Thursday 24 October 2013

Facebook posts

*SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!*

This post is a rant, I woke up in a bad mood, a few things I saw early in my day wound me up and I decided to let it out here rather than climb a clock tower with a high powered rifle and play extreme tag.

I use my phone as my alarm clock, as I'm sure the vast majority of people do these days. It's usally a safe and reliable way to get my lazy ass out of the comfy world of sleepy land.
Until this morning.
My phone (for reasons best left to itself) decided to switch itself off during the night, despite it being plugged in. This resulted in me oversleeping by an hour and consequentialy being late for work.

As I was madly rushing about, trying desperately to find a way to shorten my morning routine, I decided to take 2 minutes out to have a breather and try and center myself before I spontaniously combust on the spot.
I thought I would take a moment to check Facebook; possibly someone's witty post, or a good LolCat picture would brighten my day and set me off in a better mood.

But no.

The very first post I was confronted with was:


These posts have been doing the rounds for a while now, but this morning I just flipped.
At best, that post is blatent bullshit, and at worst it's bloody racist!

If I were to say that all blonde women are dumb, all black guys love watermelon or all people with big noses are Jewish, I'd be beaten to a pulp (and deservedly so) for being an ignorant bigot. Yet it seems perfectly acceptable to come out with wildly sweeping statements, claiming as "Fact" that people of a certain group will act a certain way because of their eye colour. Now I know that you may well read this and think I'm overreacting to something that's supposed to be a bit of fun, and maybe I am, but it's more the style of post that I'm angry about, rather than the details.

More and more I see posts and pictures put around Facebook that are claiming to be facts, where in actuality they have absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever. Many people will see them and probably do as I have done for a while, give them a thoroughly good ignoring; but there are those who will believe them, and that's what worrys me.

Another of the posts that's been doing the rounds is:

  • This year July has 5 Fridays 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This only happens once every 823 years. This is called money bags.

  • This particular one infuriates me!

    There are only seven days to a week, therefore there are only seven possible ways a month can begin, and by extension, only seven possble combinations of how many weekends there can be in that month.
    Even if we take into account skipping a day through a leap year, it only extends it to at maximum, 10 years before every day of the week has been used i.e.

    Mon, Tue, Wed, (Skip a day) Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, (Skip a day) Tue, Wed, Thu

    I pointed this out to a friend last year, and was berated for nitpicking and basically being a downer for her. Well excuse me for using fucking maths rather than ignorantly believing whatever shite pops onto the news feed next.

    There's nothing wrong with having a giggle, intentionally being a bit controvertial or just blatantly taking the piss, as long as people are aware that's what you're doing!

    So next time you see a post claiming to be a "Fact" (especially the artsy picure ones), do yourself a favour and take 2 minutes out to do a quick bit of research, who knows, you might just learn something.

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