Sometimes that happens. Often not. Whichever the case, I do get lots of mail, mostly the e-variety. Often it's something endlessly winging through cyberspace -- having been sent their way, having been previously sent, and previously sent, and.. originally composed by who cares.

Say you get an e-mail, send it to ten people who send it to ten people, who… well you know. Get a calculator. In eight forwards, it amounts to 100 million people who get the damned thing. .

If it's possible, I grow more curmudgeonly with the years. My funny button has a callus from all the ha-ha stuff. My oh-my-isn't that cute reflex is pooped. Any obligation I might once have felt to bring a nostalgic tear to someone else's eye is gone. I am not into saving souls or propagating miracles if I just send it on to ten of my friends. I'm not complaining here. I have a delete button.

See, it's not that I don't appreciate those who take the time to e-mail. I do. Many of them I know, at least casually. Most are approximately average, well-intentioned people. But, I am tempted sometimes to borrow an expression from the late great curmudgeonly Peter Boyle on the sadly discontinued Everybody Loves Raymond, "Holy crap! I can't believe they believe that."

One woman forwarded news of a vast oil reserve newly discovered in North and South Dakota and Montana which would supply the U.S. for 41 years. It was "stuff you wouldn't find on CNN and MSN." There was 503 billion barrels -- 8 times the oil in Saudi Arabia, 18 times the oil in Iraq.

The report (by USGS) came out in April 2008 but, of course, the cursed "liberal media" didn't tell us. Actually, USGS did estimate reserves for the Bakken field. at 4.3 billion barrels. With the annual US oil consumption at 10 million daily, the 4.3 billion barrels would equate to oil imports for… oh, about a year. But Americans like to believe natural resources never run out. God will see to that.

Then, there's a variety of Christianity called The Blessed Church of Holy Paranoia. Devout members toss and turn at night, sure that communists or the Muslims or the secular humanists are destroying the faith -- and are quick to hit the "send to all" key when dire threats come to their attention.

One e-mail, this one from a close relative, claims that a national World War II memorial purposely omitted FDR's blessing "So help us God" from a plaque engraved with a line from his speech about Pearl Harbor. Actually, the sentence comes from the middle of the speech, not the end. It does not contain, "So help us God." The e-mail has been making the rounds since 2004, according to the debunker Snopes.com.

Another urgent viral e-mail from a local cries out for help in stopping a movie set to debut early this summer, Corpus Christi -- which portrays Jesus and his disciples as homosexuals. While the theme has been explored in a stage play, no movies are in the works so far as anybody knows. A DVD entitled Corpus Christi was released in 2006 but that was a traditional documentary of the life of Jesus. The e-mail has been around since 2001, but the fearful faithful still react like Pavlovian pooches.

Politics is another favorite theme. A hokey quote from Karl Marx making the rounds says, (yippee!) nationalizing the banks leads to Communism. Still another e-mail feverishly disputes the U.S. citizenship of President Obama.

Despite the fact that the State of Hawaii has issued and certifies his certificate of birth, the charge survives that our new President was really born in Kenya and thus under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, ineligible to hold the office. No elected Republican of any stature supports the claim. No court anywhere in the U.S. with any judge, conservative or liberal will give credence to it. The true-believers are still salivating. Like other e-mail nonsense, this one persists.

The Scottish skeptic David Hume was right It's not really laziness or busy-ness. It's the nature of the two-legged, mostly hairless beast. Emotion guides what is often proclaimed as enlightened reason. For some, life is boring, needs a little mystery or excitement. For some, being first to tell your friends is satisfying. For others, there's perverse satisfaction in playing the victim. And for whom or what we hate, it helps to find justification. The truth is basically irrelevant. We like company, so we pass it along. Click.

It's the way we are.