Share will you….
Alan Dowling is now telling the fearbook world that he’s about to make pizza!! Actually, this blog entry started out as a ‘What’s on your mind? share comment’ on fearbook, known to everyone else as facebook, and then I asked myself, “Why the hell am I telling this mundane and worthless piece of information to the whole wide world?”.
Fearbook’s ‘What’s on your mind comments’ are a little bit like the first series of ’Big Brother’, a reality TV show of a particular kind of madness that so fascinated Britain and anyone in close enough proximity to receive Channel-4, during a long hot summer if I remember correctly – in this show contestants were put together in a house (the BIG Brother house) for a few weeks and got to air their laundry, so-to-speak in public, actually on ‘LIVE’ television, 24-hours a day, or as the Americans like to phrase it – 24/7, a particularly annoying three words for me, in a bid to be ‘BIG Brother’ champion. It attracted millions of viewers and literally took the nation (The UK) by the scruff of the neck, indeed by storm. Believe it or not, ’sane and sensible’ people sat at home late into the wee hours of darkness and during daylight hours in front of their TV sets to watch someone (a housemate) listen to a walkman or butter a piece of toast or fiddle with a can opener to rid a can of beans of its lid; viewers could also observe housemates talk about complete and utter cARp to one another and the nightowls stayed up late to observe people sleeping under a duvet or brushing their teeth. I was one of them all those years ago, on a sporadic basis, thanking the heavens that I didn’t succumb to the drug of addiction, that is ‘BIG brother’ reality TV… share will you…………. tell the world that you’re unhappy or ecstatic, that you’re in a new relationship with ‘Fantom Fok’ or ‘Kitchen Kwong’, or that you just broke up with your 7 week old fling called ‘Willie O’ Whatshisface’, share will you………. that you had a great night last night with someone you shouldn’t be seeing, or with someone you should be seeing, that you just ate the most delicious (but really very ordinary and possibly below par) muffin ever and that you drank the darkest of dark and the strongest of strong double espresso coffee from a particularly corporate cafe chain while having your cheeky facial grin photographed for all to see, or at the very least share in pornographic detail some poor quality photographs of a piece of cheesecake covered with fake raspberry fruit coulis that doesn’t have a best-before-date because it is fake, or a photo of an overcooked, over-greased and over-priced chicken wing – food porn of the highest ranking, edible porn… share will you…………. tell the world that you’re about to embark on the trip of a life time, or that you’re running late for work or that the mice can play today because the boss (the fat office cat with the leather chair) is away, or reveal that you think that you’re not impressed with someone or something when everything seemed to be going so smoothly or that the frown on peoples faces this morning wasn’t an accident but due to the Hang Seng Indexes slight overnight fall, or air your views and opinions on the weather – too hot and uncomfortable in summer and too cold and uncomfortable in winter, ‘it rains all the time here’, or write in the ‘What’s on your mind?’ box that you are about to embark on a 5 day trip in 18 days time to a spec of a country in Borneo’s north, a non-alcoholic country where in every 48-hour period any adult of voting age can bring into the sultanate, 12 cans of beer and 2 bottles of any rot gut imaginable, which in fact could easily make it the most alcoholic country on earth… share will you………… but before you start sharing every little trivial trinket of your everyday existance, I beg you to spare a thought for the tens of thousands killed and maimed in the devastating Haitian earthquake this week. Thanks for your attention… share will you…………