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The Daily News

1  WTF? WTH? OMG? FACEBOOK CHANGED!!! HORRORS!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

2   What the…???

3   I went to sleep last night at around 8:30, which I’ve been doing lately. Things looked pretty normal. The Giants were on the move to lose in agonizing fashion. The teevee had nothing but idiocy blaring from its bowels. Hulu documentaries were filled with nothing but odd stuff. The usual.

4   Somewhere around 1 a.m. I awakened and began looking for DN fodder. AOL had some stuff about babies whose heads welded together, ugly dogs, and weird co-workers. Typical AOL freak-show stuff.

5   I checked emails, and got a few dumb things, mostly stuff that is quite deletable. I truly don’t think the world is coming to an end in December of next year, for example.

6   My last resort is usually a quick stroll down Facebook Lane. I do Facebook because in 2011, it’s good to try to stick with the rest of the world, but every now and again Facebook shifts little things without consulting anyone. This causes massive insanity and hysteria up and down the world of Facebook.

7   I’m pretty cool with change, actually, especially for a geezer like me. But it seemed SO disorienting that I had to peel away. For example, what exactly does “Privacy: Shared with: Public” supposed to mean? Well, who knows. It’s just another annoyance, I imagine. Let’s start at the beginning of this stuff.

8   First, the “blue corner”. Huh? Suddenly perfectly normal posts were all getting blue corners. According to Facebook, a blue corner means that someone wrote a story that would be interesting to you. How do THEY know?

9   Next,  every single person who posted had a blue corner. Like every single person has written stories that would be of interest to me. This makes perfect sense.

10  

11  I don’t know about any of you, but that fact that some guy you marginally remember has a sore throat isn’t necessarily of interest to me.

12   Someone ate a square hamburger at Wendy’s. Marginally interesting, but only if I’m hungry and enjoy jealousy.

13   The fact that six corporations control all the world’s thinking is of little interest to me. Not much I can do about stupidity. I try beating that one down all the time. Best I buy an enormous broom and try to rid the shores of sand.

14   Sixteen-thousand pictures of people all jumping in the air at the beach doesn’t particularly interest me either.

15   You get the drift. I cruise Facebook because I occasionally get to punch an old mate in the arm, or bop off about my own stupid stuff, which most people couldn’t care less about anyway.

16  I don’t mind subscribing to the Great Social Networking Experiment.

17   In many ways, it’s sort of quaint. No rules. Just mostly charming chit-chat, and everyone trying to out-cool everyone else by being “Off to the gym!” or “Off to the Yemens!” or whatevs.

18   I just stream down for familiar names, and have a few laughs. It’s a really weird village, because it’s filled with people I have had cruise into my life at one time or another, and then drift off into the vast strangeness that is life.

19   I even keep it divided into two lives. I have my personal life, which consists of family and old friends from childhood, and I have my school life, which consists of former students and colleagues. I keep them separated only because I don’t think my school life peope necessarily want to see me doing a cannonball into a swimming pool in Tahoe, or watching me with a lampshade on my head at a summer party.

20   It’s hideously unprofessional.

21   On the other hand, I leave all of it open, because I really couldn’t care less if people “stalk” me, or look at my pics, or at my dog. Who cares?

22   AnywayZ, last night I went on my former students/colleagues Facebook and saw that the village seemed in disarray. Facebook suddenly put “blue corners” on people’s posts, shifted things around, stirring up a lot of trouble in the village.

23   The masses began assembling. Town meetings sprang up. People were handed torches. Things that were normally on the left side were now on the right. Logging out became a hesitation. It was like someone had moved your personal trash bin from the left side of your desk to the right. Anarchy rang supreme.

24   People actually threatened to move to other social networks. Evidently there is a nifty one in the United Kingdom. Pip, pip, and all that rot.

25   Personally I just rolled my eyes. It isn’t going to change my life one iota. There are things much more pressing, and what some social network does for the most part doesn’t interest me, as long as it isn’t letting people get into my bank account.

26   That would be a laugh anyway.

27   I naturally concern myself with someone copping my identity, but those six corporations want us worried and scared all the time anyway, so I can’t walk around worrying about stuff all the time. If it happens, I’ll probably be the first to cry publicly and have people post things like, “That sucks man.” But really? I don’t know what all the hoopla is.

28   I copied and pasted their idiocy at the top of this page. I’m hoping none of those links are live, or that they go into someone else’s “private” stuff.

29   I guess that’s the risk of social networking. It certainly has a weirdness to it, that’s for certain. But each time I try to bring the entire thing into the DN, it just seems useless. It simply isn’t that interesting of a topic.

30  So I’m going to get back to sleep, hopefully before two a.m. and get back into my normal routine, which is actually pretty boring, at least compared to all the fantastico things everyone else seems to be doing.

31   I’m just going back into my daily living, just like all the rest of us schmucks. My life just isn’t that interesting. Hey, my shoelace came undone yesterday. All these people do is make shoelaces…

32   It’s hot out.

33   Dude.

34   Well, maybe if I get a bit of shut-eye the Facebook changes will go away, and they’ll stop doing that sort of stuff to people. If anything, it’s just a petty annoyance, like someone moving your stuff around at your desk.

35   Certainly not world-shattering. If it really annoys me, I’ll just stay away from it. It’s not really that entertaining. It’s like watching teevee or anything else. Nice thing to do when you have absolutely nothing else to do, but not really earth-shaking.

36   That’s my read.

37   I’m just worried that I won’t receive a blue-corner because my story isn’t very interesting. I thought of posting, “Just cut my toenails for the second time since 2006″ just to see if I’d receive a blue corner from Facebook.

38   That’s not true, by the way. But if you see it posted, consider it a social-network experiment. I think it’d be great if I got “blue-cornered” on that one.

39   Ah, that’s about it. If I HAD an interesting story, you’d be reading it. Most of my stuff is just musings to spill coffee and oatmeal over.

40   And yes, I DID end a sentence in a proposition. I’ll begin the next with one.

41    I think as a “protest” we all ought to write ridiculously boring posts, just to see if Facebook gives us a blue corner.

42    Here are a few examples:

43    “Off to get my hemorrhoids removed!”

44   “Taking Phoebe to the vet for some pet lipstick.”

45   “Artichokes and beets. Nom, nom, nom!”

46    I’m going to sleep now.

47    Let me know if the world ends.

48    Nom, nom, nom.

49    Woot.

50    Peace

~H~

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