How do you say SPAM in russian?

[temporus]

I've been getting some new spam these days. But it's all in Russian. At least, I think that it's Russian, it could be another language that uses the same alphabet. My sum total experience with the Russian language was an aborted attempt to teach it to myself in 9th grade from a Berlitz book in the public library. I might have successfully taught my self how to say:

This is a pencil. Is this a pencil? Yes, this is a pencil. No that is not a pencil.

Or not.

Anyone familiar with Berlitz would recognize the above as the first lesson you learn. Though it might be a pen instead of a pencil. (For the record, I used to work for Berlitz, so I'm more than passing familiar with them, though I wouldn't work for them for another 7 years later than the above example.) The problem was, I have no frakking clue if I was pronouncing anything right. Eventually I gave up, as I did with Chinese, Thai, and a few other poor attempts back then. (At least when I tried to learn Bengali, I had a native speaker teaching me, even if Pablo wasn't a teacher, and we just made up the lessons as we went along.)

Now, I get spam in foreign languages all the time. Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, even Russian. What strikes me odd about this last batch, is I can't figure it out. There's no pictures of pills, no links to click on that would take me to a Phishing site, or someplace to buy creams, pills or devices to increase the size of some portion of the human anatomy. Nothing on the screen that would look like prices, or anything that makes my "spider-sense" tingle. (Note: I obtained that with the house when I bought it from Peter Parker, it was in the contract.) The only thing other than just plain text in the email, are the pictures of kittens. The pictures look like kittens in a shelter, which of course makes me wonder if the email is trying to get you to adopt the kittens. But, if they are, I'd expect there to be an address, or phone number, or email, or link somewhere in the message. But unless it got stripped out, I can't find it. I'd planned to print it out, to see if my wife could make heads or tails of it. But, apparently I deleted it. So now, in a perverse way, I really want to know what the heck that email said.  I'm sure that with enough patience, I'll run across it again.  Of course, I'm sure that once I have the message and I track down the meaning, I'll be disappointed.

Comments

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

Aye. I've been getting the russian ones for about a month now. Now idea what they are about. I almost wish they had a photo attached so at least I could translate some of the first words based on the estimated frequency of words used in spam titles.

[lucky-luc-mom.livejournal.com]

I wonder how you could possibly find out if that spam is really Russian? Hhmmmmm... let's think.... now, if you could only show it to someone who can read Russian, like someone who studied it for 4 years... Like your wife!

Well, silly me just finished reading your post & I've realized you have nothing to show, at present. Ohm well. Who'd have thunk we'd be secretly wishing for Cyrillic SPAM?

[temporus.livejournal.com]

I must have gone on autopilot and deleted the message, even though I thought to myself: I should save this one, and see if my wife can figure out what it says. Next time I'll remember to save it.