Thursday, June 07, 2007

On the Theme of Spam

There are several versions of this video on YouTube. I think this one has Portuguese subtitles, confirming the delightful fact that the Portuguese for Spam is, in fact, Spam.

I always thought that Spam was an acronym for "Specially Processed American Meat", but the Wikipedia article on the subject doesn't mention this as a possibility. It appears that the origins of the name are "lost in the mists of time". This gap in our knowledge has led to less-than-kind suggestions like "Something Posing As Meat". It is interesting to see that the two countries with the highest Spam consumption are the UK and South Korea----brothers under the skin, right enough!

It is a sobering fact that this year is Spam's seventieth anniversary. This and other fascinating facts can be found at Spam.com, a rather scarily professional website populated by a group of overenthusiastic spamaholics.

I think I'll go and have a cheese sandwich....