Man wakes up with hands on wrong arms; dyslexic surgeon to blame
Twitter Outrage over Revolution Facebook Relationship Status to Become Automatically Decided Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday announced that from next Tuesday the relationship status of everyone’s Facebook profile would henceforth be the product of a “totally neat algorithm”. The creepy and borderline rapey ultra-nerd made the controversial announcement in a press release otherwise filled with boring changes to the terms of service, such as Facebook’s new official policy of photoshopping swastikas into everyone’s profile pictures, “just in case”.
“It’s perfectly simple,” the dead-eyed man-child intoned. “Where before you had some degree of autonomy over who you were allegedly in a relationship with, married to, or desperately clinging on to fill the void of your adult life, from now on it will all be decided by a huge purpose- built data centre. No more will you have the worry of choosing who to pursue out of your extended social circle. Instead, we’ll choose for you a series of temporary life partners based on combined advertising potential, amount of time spent suspiciously flicking through beach photos of each other, and which lame bands you’re both fanatic about. Then, when your rate of posting on each other’s walls is judged to have fallen below a certain romance minimum – or maybe just when our engineers get bored of the way your ‘sexy’ messages always involve the same tired adjectives – we’ll break you up and find you new people to send Farmville Gifts to and whatnot!” “And that’s not all,” he added, though few among the witless crowd of twittering journos were listening. “Absolute control over the romantic events in your life has given us exciting new opportunities for marketing that the whole team’s really pumped about. From now on, when you send a booty call notification to that girl you barely know but who’s been told to accept you by the pitiless data-fondling of the machines, if you don’t buy Facebook branded condoms from the sidebar ads, you’re not even getting the pathetically hollow amount of human contact you’ve been allocated. Finally been granted permission to breed by the algorithm’s calculation of maximum snivelling, advertising-revenue-earning offspring? You’d better make sure we have your credit card details on file and a power of attorney to buy you a Mafia Wars pram, otherwise boom! Impotence. Yeah, we can do that.” Tom Keefe
28
Science & Technology
Twits the world over were reportedly outraged yesterday after a revolutionaries in a small oil-rich Arab nation failed to use the hit social microblogging service to coordinate their stealthy and well-thought-out campaign to remove their theocratic dictator from power. Despite exhaustive research by this newspaper, involving reading nearly all trending topics on twitter, it appears that at the time of going to press not a single bravely-worded but utterly inconsequential hashtag had been used by the courageous desperadoes intent on bringing liberty to where there had been none before. “It's an outrage,” regular twazzock, social media expert and microraconteur Dave Suburbanite (author of such oft- retweeted gems as “I like TV #thingsilike” and “mmm pizza #eatingstuff”) told The Lemon Press. “It appears that the people of this small, beautiful yet war-torn country I couldn't find on a map have had the gall to try and organize a revolution without, well, us!” “Don't they know,” he continued magnaminously, “that I have had not one, not two, but three of my excreably banal utterances quoted in a New York Times liveblog in a desperate attempt to make things in a far-off country of which we know little understandable to the little people such as yourself? It beggars belief that these grim men of action and justice have better things to do than set up twitter accounts for me to devour and regurgitate to my thousands of followers. They're only attempting to steal a country. It's not as if they have to decide whether their movement should be known as the #fuschiapinkpatriots or the #apricotavengers.” The situation worsened late last night after the revolutionaries finally released a statement following several days of intense fighting in and around the capital. “We appreciate it may be hard for you to understand,” it began, “but broadcasting every step of our intentions in 140-character spurts would not have been conducive to a successful revolution, particularly since our leader's account was being 'followed' by the ex-Ministry of Oppression. It's no big deal, he only used it, like, twice. Couldn't see the point, he says. It's a bit self-important, no? Anyway. We would respectfully suggest that it was not the tweets that made the difference in this war, but the people with guns.” Such a heinous suggestion has of course caused friction in the twitverse, and at time of press a hashtag campaign to #bombthoseungratefulbrownpeople had reached one million retweets, well over the limit required for it to become official government policy since the USA passed the Bloody Stupid Act of 2010. In the words of the official US Marine Corps Account, “We're coming, suckers! #funnydeclarationsofwar #roflmao”.
Want more?
Tom Keefe