Spam-a-lot

 Spam-a-lot: If there's one thing the music staff here at the Dallas Observer can agree on, it's Vanilla Ice. We love Vanilla Ice. We want to party with him. We want to party with him soooooo bad! So imagine our happy surprise when, upon checking our tricked-out MySpace page, we noticed an Internet ad that read "Want to party with Vanilla Ice?"! Hell yeah! Dallas' finest musician! So we clicked on the ad, which led us to www.partywithastar.com. The instructions seemed so simple: 1) Enter your information. 2) Answer all questions. 3) Continue to the Thank You page. Cool! Our information is your information, and shit, who doesn't like to be thanked, right? You even get to choose which star you want to party with—Ice, Cindy Margolis, Ant the Comic (??), Steve-O or Traci Bingham. We chose Ice, of course, entered our e-mail address, name, etc.

OK, but, see, Step 2 is where things started going awry. "All questions" means about 200 yes-or-no checkboxes in which you must confess to, among other things, whether or not you use adult diapers, whether your credit is bad, whether you are willing to sell your soul for a free iPod (with the replies gathered from the Observer staff, the answer to all three is "yes"). But hell, it's worth putting your dirty secrets out there on the Internet to get some face time with the Ice Man, so we answered. We checked box after box. After box. It was an unending series of questions, more creepy and arcane than a CIA background check. Until, finally, the Thank You page!

That was two weeks ago. So far, no one has alerted us to our scheduled date for partying with Vanilla Ice. We have, however, experienced a three-fold increase in spam, our inboxes inundated with queries such as "WANT A FREE LAPTOP???" to which our answer is "NO!! WE WANT TO PARTY WITH VANILLA ICE!!"

Since the partywithastar Web site provides absolutely no contact information whatsoever, we have no way of checking on our submitted form. But we sit at our desks, fingers crossed, "Ice, Ice, Baby" running through our heads, knowing that if there's a chance we could party with, say, 2 Live Crew, we'd do it all over again.