The widely acclaimed ""Voiceover King" is now forever silent. Don LaFontaine, whose strong, deep, assured voice accompanied untold thousands of movie trailers, TV show plugs and commercials, died Sept. 1.

Until he did a TV spot for Geico, LaFontaine's face was virtually unknown; even since then, most people could pass him by in the mall and not realize they were passing greatness.

LaFontaine's famous delivery and his de facto trademark kickoff to so many trailers - "In a world …" was parodied endlessly. Lord knows I have cleared my throat and tried not to squeak as I employed that phrase for some inane reason or another - including reading fat-packed items on a truck stop menu ("In a world where steaks are chicken-fried, one man just wants a salad...).

LaFontaine could raise or lower the timbre of his voice just enough that the delivery perfectly matched the materials, from The Terminator to The Simpsons.

His deepest voices have been compared with the sound of God speaking from a mountaintop. So - maybe when God is busy, He will put Don LaFontaine on the prayer line.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, even the gods themselves struggle in vain against spam. Like al Qaeda terrorists, spamorrists have shown Darwinian survival traits in adapting to and defeating efforts to shield our inboxes from spam. Fortunately, a lot of it is easy to spot and mass-delete. But what about those "OMG You Must Read And Pass This Along" messages from your friends, acquaintances and business contacts.

Your e-mail filters can be a great ally in helping you manage these kinds of messages, whose senders you don't want (or possibly, can't afford) to block forever. And maybe you do want to read the message, but just don't want it glaring at you from the inbox.

It takes some experimentation with your particular e-mail application, but generally it's possible to set it up to handle many of these messages automatically.

Your e-mail application should have some kind of filter or rules function that lets you select specific words, e-mail addresses, sender names or combinations of those. You can designate whether the filter should look at the subject, sender or body of the e-mail.

Further, you can tell the filter to check if the locations contain/do not contain, begin/end with any or all of the criteria you set.

Example: Let's say I have a friend named Spike who daily sends me a column by a writer I dislike, but read because it is sometimes informative. I just don't want to read it immediately. I can set my e-mail filter as follows:

Rule: SpikeColumn

if ALL of the following conditions are met:

FROM CONTAINS spike@buffy.net

MESSAGE BODY CONTAINS Heloise

Perform the following actions:

MOVE MESSAGE TO HOUSEHOLD HINTS FOLDER

I specified that all those conditions had to be met in order to move only the "Heloise" email to the Household Hints folder, because Spike sends me other messages that I do need to read promptly. If I had said any, all of Spike's messages would wind up there.

Again, depending on your e-mail app, the filters or rules will allow you to set multiple criteria to further refine the screening process. They can assign priorities, automatically reply to or forward messages, and of course, delete them.

A little practice will enable you to set up a filter in almost no time, and could save you much more time and aggravation in dealing with an overflowing inbox.

Awards contests are the term paper/finals of the publishing industry. As a custom media company, Hammock enters a number of contests each year, and we've done well. Entering a competition is a true team effort - at the minimum you involve at least one editor, a writer, and a designer, More often, you have to pull everyone in and engage in serious discussions about your product and about strategy.

That takes a lot of time - and the fact that competition sponsors often extend the deadlines testifies that most companies go down to the wire to get the job done. If you've done it, you know. If not, I'm here to help you through the process.

Over more than 21 years with custom media firms, I have somehow regularly drawn the award entry wrangling duty. So I feel that I can speak as an expert when it comes to making it to the FedEx collection center just before closing.

Here are my tips for my fellow competition wranglers:

Today is the seventh anniversary of 9/11. I learned about it via CB radio - I was listening to truckers instead of commercial radio and heard someone say a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. A few minutes later, the terrible news came that a second plane had hit the other tower and that a third airliner struck the Pentagon. It was a mild, sunny September day here in Nashville, but the rest of the day things seemed shadowed as in the midst of an eclipse.

A Marine friend sent me the following video, recorded by cowboy poet Baxter Black. It's a reminder of the blessings we have, that blessings can be yanked away in an instant, and that many, many people are trying very hard to do just that. Fortunately, many are trying to prevent it, as well.

It happens so often that you sometimes think they're watching you: You sit down to dinner or to watch a favorite TV show—and the phone rings. From cemetery plots to seductively low-interest credit cards, it seems that every telemarketer has your number. Ditto when you go to the mailbox and drag out a few forests worth of unsolicited credit card offers, vacation getaways, pleas for money and catalogs from companies you have never dealt with.

Although you cannot completely stop the flood, you can dam it up to a trickle, thanks to various federal, state and marketing industry resources.

Important Note: Running "stop junk mail" through a search engine will yield a number of businesses that offer to take the job off your hands for a fee. You do not need to pay someone to do it for you. Ignore them - if for no other reason than it is infinitely more satisfying to do the deed yourself.

Junk Mail

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse offers - for free - a wealth of information about junk mail, including how you get on lists in the first place, who the biggest mailers are, and forms to submit to junk mail sources.

Their information can help you selectively block certain kinds of direct marketing mail, while allowing other kinds to come through.

Your state probably also has a Do Not Call list, which I recommend as a backup to the national list. Tennessee's registry includes a Do Not Fax option, as well.

It's important to note there are some exceptions to these restrictions. Non-profit, charitable organizations, polling and political candidates generally are exempt. So are companies or organizations with which you have an existing business relationship, such as credit card companies or rug-cleaning services.

However, you can ask them to remove you from their lists and not contact you again, which seems to work well. Unsolicited telemarketer also are supposed to honor that wonderful phrase. It's not quite as good as "Avada Kedevra!" but it's close …