Want some male enhancement? New blouse bunnies? Extend that schlong. Spam can actually be fairly amusing at times – that is if it hasn’t just shut down your server, e-mail account or got you in trouble with your boss. I’m amazed at the number of names for intimate body parts they’ve thought up in the never ending battle against spam filters. It ends up sounding like that scene in Austin Powers:

I do feel sorry for the original Spam though. What a marketing nightmare when your product has a name that is now ubiquitous with illegal and destructive computer programmes. Bugger. It wasn’t that nice after all. Even Monty Python are glad to see the back of it.

Never has there been a more infuriating little frog. On the scale of wierdness, the Toad out of The Wind and the Willows was pretty strange -but he was a gentleman of sorts and certainly didn’t have his male genitalia hanging out.

The incomprehensible “Daa Daa Di Daa Daa” etc also adds to the perverse character that has infected several thousand mobile phones and disgraced advertising segments. The rising tone and urgency of this… song? is somehow psychologically engineered to induce panic and claustrophobia.

I will not even go into the gross overpricing of the polyphonic ringtones. That could take up an entire website alone.

As though the ring tone and the dark rimmed eyes of the grey cartoon character weren’t enough, somebody thought it appropriate to extend the several seconds of horror into an entire single released into music stores across the world. Evil knows no limits. I even saw the “music video”  in the pub the other night and I had to lie down in a dark room for an hour.

A friend of mine decided that it would be funny to download this particular monstrosity onto his girlfriend’s mobile phone. Understandably, she questioned her choice of mate and promptly put the phone onto silent until she could extricate herself from the tentacles of the phone company charging her by the second for listening to the harmonies of hell.

I wish they had banned the thing as promised.

Quite possibly the most annoying ‘help’ you’re ever likely to be offered. When Microsoft got together to write Microsoft Word, they must have thought long and hard about how to offer support to people who can’t perform simple tasks. They came up with “Clippy”.

I’m pretty sure that no-one finds Clippy’s interjections helpful. Moreover, this annoying little chap only allows you to “hide” him, or not to “show me this tip again.” There should be a nuke button.

One good thing that came out of this was an email that went round a couple of years ago which made a joke out of this – e.g. “Looks like you’re writing a suicide note…”

However, for pure annoyance, Clippy must rate pretty high on the Shitometer. Vote him up there.