As tireless and timely as the tributes, the forwarded e-mails keep coming. One with the subject line “Hankie alert!,” popped up only a few weeks ago. It sets a bizarre, Hallmark-in-the-Twilight Zone scene wherein a fleet of ultra-cuddly puppies welcome the victims of the World Trade Center disaster into heaven.

"One cozy-looking fluffy pup hesitantly asked, ŒAre there any children coming? I would be very comforting for a child 'cause I'm soft and squishy and I always wanted to be hugged.' A group of Dalmatians came forward asking to meet the firemen and be their friends." It goes on and on like that. Hankie? Where's my straight razor?

For a lot of people, TV has showed us, 9/11 was a call to action. Volunteers lined up for blocks in New York City. An excess of donors showed up at the Red Cross. We saw interviews with wives whose husbands went off to enlist that day.

And the rest of America, it seems, sat at its computers and started e-mailing me. Especially the ones with Photoshop. The sheer volume of WTC-related forwards forced me to make a separate mailbox. But what do these missives from total strangers say about us as a society?

Realistically? Nothing we don't already know. That we were pretty shook up. That we make bad jokes. That we want money. That some of us just don't get it.

On the day of the 11th, most of the e-mails I got were either of the "I'm OK, are you OK?" variety and the "update" variety. The latter kind contained all kinds of misguided rumors (some from reputable news sources) from that chaotic day: "The Mall of America was bombed," "A plane crashed into Camp David," "They have eight planes."

Ever since then, though, most 9/11 e-mails have been of the "I'm so funny" or "I'm such an a-hole" variety. Sifting through them I found:

An ad for an apparently real Osama bin Laden urinal target, and another for OBL toilet paper. (Later, The Onion ran a story with the headline "Entrepreneur stuck with 40,000 unsold bin Laden Urinal Cakes.")

A picture of an anti-American protester accidentally lighting himself on fire while trying to burn the flag. A caption describes him as a terrorist asshole and, in the parlance of those credit card commercials, describes the scene as "priceless." If everybody who hated America was a terrorist we'd really be in trouble.

A link promising: "Osama bin Laden screws a donkey at the Tali-barn!!" At press time the CIA could not confirm the existence of a Tali-barn.

One with a plan: Kidnap OBL, give him a sex change and send him back to human-rights-deficient Afghanistan as a woman. Yeah, just kidnap him.

A faux memo from a dorky bin Laden to the other residents of his cave. ("I bought a box of Dairylea recently, clearly wrote ŒOssy' on the front, and put it on the top shelf. Today, two of my Dairylea slices were gone. Consideration. That's all I'm saying.")

Instructions on how to fold a 20-dollar bill into a sort-of likeness of the two burning towers. There's also a how-to for making the damaged Pentagon, but that one's even more of a stretch.

An MP3 of "Come Mr. Tally-ban," a momentarily clever and timely parody of "Day-o."

Then there's the numerology one, with all the "spooky" instances of the number 11 (Ooh, look what happens when you add one and one and nine).

And the Nostradamus ones, wherein the famous psychic supposedly predicted the whole thing (all you have to do is splice some unrelated passages together). How come we never get one of these 500-year-old prophesies in time to actually do anything? Could we work on that?

A picture of The Sopranos cast with the caption: "Just tell us where bin Laden is and fuhgedaboudit." Twenty years ago it would have been the A-Team and they would have had a better chance.

A cartoon of worried-looking guys in turbans huddled around a note which reads "To the Taliban, give us Osama bin Laden or we'll send your women to college."

Another, with the subject line "Osama bin Laden (WAS FOUND)," went on, "Well Maybe that bustard wasn't fount yet! But, what you just found is an amazing way of supporting the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!! My name is Debbie and I am a proud American babe, My full-time job is to play with myself on my webcamera! : )" I've left Debbie the patriot's spelling eccentricities in place for your enjoyment.

There are, of course, running gags, like the America-under-the-Taliban theme: doctored photos of George W. Bush with a beard and turban, mosques in the New York City skyline, the Statue of Liberty in a burka.

An e-mail from some guy I don't know implores me to "STAY VIBRANT, REMAIN PURPOSEFUL." OK!

Those pictures of Satan in the clouds of smoke in the collapsing towers, later printed by The Daily News. And of course there are parodies of that.

Lots of pictures of eagles doing things: firing missiles from under their wings, chomping on bin Laden's severed head, crying, crying in front of the rubble, crying in front of the towers (an obvious anachronism, but we get the point).

Then there's that famous one (left) of the guy on the observation deck of the WTC as a plane flies toward him. It comes with a Blair Witch-style caption, "This picture was taken by a tourist atop the World Trade Center. His camera was found in the rubble, he has not yet been found."

Never mind all the conflicting shadows or that the 11th was sunny and 75 degrees and this guy's dressed for winter -- plenty of news organizations had experts "debunk" this obvious bunk. Since the e-mail first went around, numerous websites (whose counters I will not engorge by reprinting the URLs) have popped up which stick the "Tourist Guy" into other famous disasters in history. He's sort of like the Forrest Gump of death, showing up, in the same pose, at the Titanic, the Hindenburg and the Battlefield Earth premiere.

A graphic of "Afghanistan after the war," with golden McDonald's arches all over the map. Wait, what kind of victory are we looking for here?

This last one sums up America's indomitable spirit: A decal depicting Calvin pissing on bin Laden, on the back windshield of an enormous SUV.