Some things should never make a comeback: the Yugo, Celebrity Boxing with Tonya Harding and Danny Bonaduce, the lime-green pantsuit Hillary Clinton wore on her first campaign swing through Iowa.
I put Spam on the no-comeback list, too.
Yet now comes word that Spam - the pink slab of pork and ham that comes in a can from Hormel, not the junk mail in your inbox - has become wildly popular again in this staggering economy.
At a little over two bucks a can, it's a cheap way to eat something that looks like meat's illegimate cousin, but is, in fact, actual meat.
What's really amazing, though, is that this isn't really a comeback for Spam at all. Because it never really went away.
In fact, since Jay Hormel invented it in 1937, almost 7 billion cans have been sold worldwide. In the U.S. alone, more than 90 million cans are sold every year.
Which means even though Spam has been the butt of jokes and Monty Python skits and a hit Broadway show (Spamalot), a lot of people still love the stuff, recession or no recession.
To find out why, I called Dan Armstrong and Dustin Black, a couple of 30-ish advertising guys in Minnesota who are so passionate about Spam that they wrote The Book of Spam, billed as "A Most Glorious and Definitive Compendium of the World's Favorite Canned Meat."
As you might have guessed, Armstrong and Black know more about Spam than is healthy.
They have toured the Hormel factory in Austin, Minn., and endured the penetrating odor from the nearby slaughterhouse, where thousands of Spam-worthy hogs are butchered.
They have visited Austin's Spam Museum, "a sparkling 16,500-square-foot monument" to the Spam lifestyle, Armstrong calls it, adding, "It's a lot cooler than I thought it would be."
And they can expound at length on the Spammobiles, trolleylike vehicles that travel around the country on goodwill tours, dispensing free samples of Spam to all who, um, actually want them.
Armstrong said he grew up eating and liking Spam, encouraged by a dad who called it "the meat that won the war."
That would be the Big One, World War II, when Spam fortified hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and sailors, who apparently viewed eating mushy meat out of a can as a minor inconvenience, preoccupied as they were with trying not to be killed by the Germans and Japanese.
"So Spam always had this patriotic aura to me," Armstrong says. "I felt I could conquer anything with that in me. It was sort of like Popeye with his spinach."
