Everybody Having Fun?

The Silly Season is here, roll out the carols! Fair enough, why not? I enjoy a good Christmas carol as much as the next person but some of the lyrics are enough to send Mormons to the scotch. For instance: "Now here it is Merry Christmas, everynodys having fun." No, just no. There is no 'feelgood' vibe there, not really. If you were to take away the extremely catchy music all you'd be left with is a wet fart of assembled words, empty of anything sincere and promising...well not much.
Its rather like saying, "I like putting baked beans in jacket potatoes, you do too!" Then adding a sappy "groovy" at the end.
Everybodys having fun? Surely not EVERYBODY? Even the homeless? The ones in warzones? Lonely people at their wits end? Pensioners struggling to heat their homes? Those unfortunates who have been made redundant weeks before Christmas? Lost souls crushed by addiction who see dying as a good option? Genuine disabled folks who have had their benefits cut? (And like the addicts see death as a better way.) Abused children who are beaten and raped by real life monsters?
The longer list I trot out, the heavier I feel my fingers hitting the keyboard, angry and saddened by the fact that no, not everyone is having fun at all. Not by a long shot. I realise Christmas carols must be sickly cheerful and sugar coated with dreamy sentiments, and its nice to be able to escape for a bit but lets not ever forget that its ESCAPING we are doing. The jolly-carol-festive-world is Shangria La. Enjoy but dont forget (I know some will have by the end of reading this) that Christmas doesn't give us all a means to hide for a while and it isn't always icing sugar on mince pies (or whatever that sugary stuff is.)
Of course this post is not meant to be taken as some astounding revelation, and neither is it to put a dampner on peoples festivities. Its just here as a simple reminder, this is all. Enjoy and remember your fellow man!

Mimicks and the Mumbles

Interwebz forum and message boards. Love or loathe them they are here to stay (as long as the webby is) and they are the social setting of the future. The digital chat in the local pub (sadly minus the ale) between friends and occasionaly enemies. I am currently a contributing member on two forums but have been around them since the Sega Dreamcast hosted a chat room via Dreamarena.
They are generally great places to hang out and debate, and I have made many good friends through them. Folk I would dearly love to meet in the real world.
There is one thing I find annoying however, even more than the trolls. I like to call them the Mimicks, because they like to believe themselves knowledgable and full of great quotes but its all stolen.


A real cuckoo last week

These people simply turn to Google, that great faux intelligence enabler and copy and paste 'their' ideas and thoughts on a particular subject into a forum thread. Nobodies standing on the shoulders of giants, unable to arrive at an original idea themselves, they hide amongst the writings of people who can. Wordsworth crops up in a particular thread? No problem, head on over to a website dedicated to his quotes and copy/paste them as if you were a learned student of the poet. Something of a medical nature in another thread? Easy peasy, copy and paste your way like you were a real doctor. Result!
The trouble is, its not a result, its pathetic like the spelling pedants that also seem to inhabit interwebz forums.
There used to be a few on a board I no longer frequent. On any given thread one could virtually guarantee one of them would throw in a few quotes by George Bernard Shaw or Churchill in an attempt to show how well read or cultured they were, when in all likelihood they had never picked up a book in their lives. Certainly not ones written by the likes of the aforementioned Bernard Shaw.
Another one of these irritants would delight in pasting medical advice, whenever another member had some kind of ailment. I often wondered if he ever suspected most of us knew he was a fraud and was resorting to lifting articles from genuine medical websites. On second thoughts he probably did not, as the type of person who would stoop to this behaviour is so full of his own self important wind that they no doubt sh!t medals to themselves.
I find it almost vulgar if I am honest. That some anonymous fool with access to the innterwebz can spout off on subjects that he or she has little or no knowledge about, taking ideas that don't belong to them and passing them off as their own. Its like those Walter Mitty type, fake soldiers who attend Rememberance Sundays wearing medals they have not earned.
They claim to be fountains of knowledge and point other forum members in the direction of classic works of literature to read, when they haven't read those works themselves! The most obvious ones are the types who quote Shakespeare because you can tell (well I can being a real fan of the playwright/poet) that they have never read a sonnet of his in their lives. But of course every notable writer or philospher are used by these Mimicks.
It i s a very sad note indeed because at the end of the day, when the computer is turned OFF and the mask of the message board put away for the night, the only one they have fooled is themselves. And its a sorry reflection that looks out from the mirror of a conman.