This is a thread for lampooning the kind of inane, empty posts that haunt Facebook. The key word is lampoon. The idea is not just to repeat drivel, but to do it in an over-the-top (or is it under the bottom?) way, and make it funnier, causticer, and generally slightly more amusing than the real thing.

I'll start it off. I went on vacation last week too. I was sitting in Subway when I thought you know what? I just bet people would LOVE to see a picture of what I'm eating. Fortunately I had my camera with me, so one click-click later...



Sorry, it didn't occur to me how much you'd want to see it until it was half gone. But I can assure you that the rest of it was just as good.

It was hot.

(The good thing about this one is that it doubles as both a dumb Facebook post, and as the opening line of a typical Hemingway story).

I've been too busy (or uninterested) to come up with any more parody Facebook entries, so I thought I'd supplement with some actual mind-bogglingly dull ones.

This one is not from the guy who posts endlessly about the weather, or the guy who posts pictures of his dinner, or even the girl who posts about nothing but Facebook policies and bunnies. This is from someone I've never mentioned before. But when it comes to posts about nothing, this one ought to win some kind of Seinfeld Award:



I'm kind of in awe of this one, I have to admit.

From the weatherman:

How about this one?


Life is short and uncertain--which seems to me to be a very good reason to do something other than clean the house.

At least that one says something. It's highly debatable, but it's not nothing.

Hm, okay, how about this one.
, or


A funny one was from the guy who, all this time, thought that when weather people talked about the "windchill factor", they were saying "windshield factor".

They have a lot of similar word jokes like that on Fibber McGee and Molly. Sometimes they run on for a while. Like McGee will say he wants to find something to break the monopoly, and Molly says no, that's monotony. "Whaddya mean monotony? I've only been married once." "That's not monotony, that's monogamy." "Oh yeah? If that's monogamy, then what's our coffee table made out of?" The wordplay on that show is always razor sharp.

Phil Harris would do that constantly too, based on the premise that his character was supposed to be illiterate. Like his wife is having a baby, and he can't see her until she gets out of the klink. "The klink?" "Yeah, it says so right on that door. C-L-I-N-I-C." "That's clinic!!" "Well, what's the difference? She can't get out of either one." Or a druggist might ask what kind of cough drops he wants. "I'll take the kind made right here in LA." "In LA?" "Yeah, like it says on that package. L-O-Z-E-N-G-E-S: Los Angeles." "That's Lozenges!"


You see a lot of weird, but totally serious mistakes like that when you look online for transcripts and song lyrics. People take guesses when they can't hear the lyrics, and are sometimes comically off. Like when I was looking for That's What I Like About the South lyrics, there's a line about "sipping absinthe in New Orleans", and someone who probably didn't know what absinthe was heard it as "sitting absent in New Orleans", which makes no sense but they wrote it that way anyway.

The last line of the original Blackadder theme is "You horrid little man". I guess "horrid" isn't a word used in America that much, so when I went googling lyrics for it years ago, several people thought it was "You are a little man", which makes a little sense, but is stupid. I'd rather not put up the lyrics at all if I knew they were wrong. I'd hold them back until they were right.

All this in the last 15 minutes.









And I know what he's talking about, more or less. (I don't know WHY he's talking about it, but I know what). I can just imagine how this would play to someone who didn't.

This is not from the weatherman guy, this is by the guy who thought we all wanted to see a picture of his dessert. This one is almost as ridiculous as Chess Fan giving up-to-the-minute updates on football games in progress, just to have a way of writing a post when there was nothing to say. In fact, a place like Facebook, would be the perfect place for him to operate. So many of the posts there are content-free or link-spamming already, who'd notice one more?

Anyway, these guys have gotten me wondering about Facebook etiquette. I've only un-friended one person so far, and that for conspicuous bigotry. Every post she wrote (and there were a lot), were long rants about how much she hated everyone in the other political party, usually for reasons she didn't explain very well. (I won't embarrass people in her party by saying which one it was). I didn't say anything to her, as I didn't want to embarrass her. I just quietly unfriended her.

Right after I did that, another friend wrote a post, very upset about someone who had unfriended her without explanation. She thought it was very bad manners, and if you have a problem with someone, you ought to tell them why before you dump them, et cetera. Meanwhile, I had just done the same thing to someone else. With that person I hadn't seen them so long, I didn't think they'd even notice.

This guy probably would notice if he never saw my posts again. And he's every bit as bad as Chess Fan. Not in the sense of being nasty or abusive or combative, or self-absorbed, but in the sense of never posting anything of any value, just post after post about nothing, or repeating something someone else said, or some such. Total waste of bandwidth.

So, what should I do? I don't want to tell him this. No need to hurt his feelings over something he can't change anyway, and when there are other options. I don't want to unfriend him without explanation either, and have him ask why. I could block his posts, and then risk missing it if he does talk to me, and thinking he's being snubbed. I guess that last option is the best one, just wondering if anyone else has run into this problem, and what they did.

Hey Petrosianic, I'm glad to see that you are **STILL** thinking about me!


Chess Fan