Spam was invented in 1937. There's a museum in Austin, Minnesota you can visit to see it, too. But let's not be cute - we're talking about Spam the food. What I like is the fact that they've held on to the massively excellent www.spam.com and although they're clearly profiting from selling Spam-brand T-shirts and stuff just to web-users, coders and developers, they don't make any mention of the fact that the majority of the population use their name to mean something else. I mean, why don't they even send out bulk e-mails to people? That'd be the marketing trick of the decade.

But no. They're happy that to them Spam means meat in a can and to everyone else born after World War II it means spam. Could you imagine if to 'Nike' became a word meaning to cold-call people on the phone? If, by 'Disneying', you were dropping litter in public places? Those corporations would go mental. But the Spam people don't care.

The company that make Spam are called Hormel Foods. Let's start calling unwanted e-mails Hormel Foods;

"Four days off work and I come back to find 223 Hormel Foods in my Inbox!"

"Dude, if you Hormel me once more with that dancing camel I'll shatter your skull with my monitor!"

"Buy HormelFoodsGuard™ to stop unwanted Hormel Foods clogging your computer!"

Yeah, much as I love the makers of Spam, they're too cool about their name. And that goes for the hundred-year-old family-run company who make carpentry tools for craftsmen. What were they called? I remember. h4xx0r.