To all my friends and family on Facebook (and since I’m posting this on my blog which will show up on my Facebook feed, also all my non-Facebook connected readers)… I can already hear the groans, oh no, not another one. Yes, a request for a repost on your status for seventeen and one quarter hours to prove that you read this and care, only not really, because why would I want to screw with your Timeline? But if you don’t, I will, through the magic that is the internet (please note, no “s”, it’s not “internets”, it never was except in George Bush’s mind and hopefully never will be and you don’t want me thinking that you hung on his every word now and/or are ignorant, do you?), automatically know that you don’t care about anything, anyone, or anywhere, and aren’t really my friends or family, because that’s how the internet works. Because I know that 100% of you read, in detail, everything I post, and are so awed by my having reposted something someone else shamed, no bored, me into posting (well, in this case, I didn’t, I made this up), that you just had to follow my instructions. No, you see, I won’t know, excuse my French, Greek, or whatever, jack-shit about what it means about you or anyone else. And you reposting it and having other people repost it won’t mean anything to anyone either, unless you believe that The Force, Divine Will or a new version of The Ten Commandments is generated by electrons flowing through Mark Zuckerberg’s server farm, which is what he wants you to believe, but trust me, the only thing that electrons flowing through his servers generates is revenue for his and his shareholders’ pockets – which, admittedly, for all I know could be one of you, in which case, you’re just paying yourself to copy this, sort of like electronic financial masturbation. Because even if you repost it and every other one of the three dozen per day, thereby making it impossible to do within this space-time continuum “post this to your status update for one hour so I know that you give a shit” status updates from the zillion people you’re connected to on Facebook that you’ve never even met and never will, you do it so automatically now that 13 seconds later you couldn’t remember what cause, disease, injury, cat photo (no, I’d never post a cat photo, at least not Those kind of cat photos) or fashion statement I asked you to repost about, even if I threatened to tie a dog to a car roof, shoot a gazelle, or run my fingernails down a chalkboard. And it won’t affect your day one iota, or jot, which is really just the English derivative of iota. It’s like breaking a chain letter, a concept that 93.2% of the people on Facebook are too young to have ever heard of and would make fun of you if you didn’t break it for being superstitious, time wasting, and old-fashioned. Plus you’d need a stamp and I don’t think they sell those anymore. The only difference is that a chain letter might have actually demonstrated the process of Six Degrees of Separation because it was selective and worked through people you actually knew, whereas a Facebook status update is like rock salt from a sawed-off, it hits anyone and everyone and stings, and demonstrates that you’re passive-aggressive manipulative (but you already knew that) and that there might very well be no degrees of separation anymore, except that I guarantee that 90% of you who read this have at least 10% of Facebook friends who you actually haven’t a freaking clue who they are and have no intention to find out but you’re too embarassed by the possibility that out there in the world someone who doesn’t even know you might dislike you for a nanosecond if you Unfriend them that you just leave them there, reading all about your personal life – yes, that’s right, a complete stranger reads about the intimate details of your life on a daily basis because you Friended them in a moment of unclarity… think about it, and then go Unfriend them because, ewwww (I’m using that for manipulative emotional effect). Now, since I freely admit that I don’t read everything that every one of you posts (and particularly not those of you who I’m not even connected to on Facebook), I may not even know if you copied and pasted or shared this or whatever it is you do with it (see below), because with 746 “friends” on that social network as of today (I know, it’s a pitiful number, but I’m, amazingly enough, for the most part only connected here to people I’ve actually met outside, in the real world, with only a few exceptions who are friends of friends, and one “other” Dan Perlman whom I’d have probably unfriended long ago if it wasn’t for the fact that he has a good sense of humor for a die-hard Democrat, appreciates a good bbq brisket, and we can fuck with each other’s Timelines by commenting on each other’s posts), I’d spend way too much time just keeping up with what’s going on if I read it all, and for most people I get “Only Important” updates, some I get “Most Updates”, and only a select few do I get “All Updates”. Like everyone else’s settings. And even within those I’ve selected out what types – after all, do I really want to see Life Events, Status Updates, Photos, Games, Comments and Likes, Music and Videos, and Other Activity, from all of you? Sorry, no. Especially Other Activity. I don’t even know what that is and I’m quite sure I don’t want to. I’ve even convinced myself that my life is richer without knowing about your Other Activity. And besides, I’m also Circled (is that the right term?) with 157 people on Google+, 3 of whom aren’t also my Facebook friends because they’ve eschewed it as a bad game and I’m quite sure that if I could remember the password to my MySpace page I might even have connections to 7 other people who also don’t remember their passwords and therefore never disconnected our connection. And that’s without even checking to see if there’s even still a site called Friendster on which I think I got up to 18 people at one point, 3 of whom were Russian women looking for dates, sex or marriage, not necessarily in that order. There’s LinkedIn, on which I’m linked to like a million and half people or at least 1,018, I think, but don’t really know because the Address Book is always “Unavailable”, but it’s not really a social network and I never post anything there anyway, except maybe I’ll post this. Twitter, let’s not even go there. I mean, I have two accounts, one personal, one business, and my tweets go out to a whole lot of people which is why I don’t tweet personal stuff on my business account, not that it matters because I don’t really control who follows either of them (sure, I could, but again, much time wasting would be involved), so really I don’t tweet much of anything that’s particularly personal on either account, and trust me, I sure as hell don’t follow everyone’s tweets in return – remember that whole I don’t even know who they are part back in the middle of this overly long, run-on paragraph? At least on Twitter I can go look at their tweets before I decide to follow them or not and see if they have anything remotely interesting to say, and sometimes I follow for a short while and then unfollow if they start tweeting about LOLcats or live coverage of their daughter’s Parcheesi tournament progress. Where was I? Oh yes, hmm, no. That’s really it, I mean, don’t repost this anywhere, just Like it or +1 it or share the link somewhere because damnit, this is copyrighted deep thinking here and if you want to share similar thoughts with your “friends”, write it your own damn self. And, by the way, here’s a picture of an artichoke on my cutting board because someone once told me that no one reads blog posts unless they have a photo or other “graphic”. It has absolutely nothing to do with this missive, unless you want to get all philosophical about layers and pointy leaves, but I did write a lovely column for this last weekend’s BA Herald where you can read all about how to prepare an artichoke.