Facebook hacks: or, why it is so depressing to be a blogger

Well, first of all nobody buys your books anyway, even though you forced yourself to start a blog to promote the book. Which everyone told you you HAD to do.

It's all a  popularity contest based on views and followers, meaning 98% of bloggers will beat you every time.

The only really enjoyable thing is writing the posts, which is considered the least important.

But no. THAT is not the thing that pisses me off today.

At the top of my Facebook page, a yellow bar appeared today that I cannot get rid of. This yellow bar has a little triangle with an exclamation point inside it, and it wants me to give my phone number to Facebook "to help secure your account AND MORE." The "and more" is never explained.

I do not want to give my phone number to Facebook. At all. EVER. No matter how many reassurances they give me that it will be kept private, it won't be. Things are being hacked all the time, daily, things which, incredibly, are even more important than Facebook.

This post is a sad little thing. I wrote a nice fat juicily angry one backed up with lots of articles from The Guardian, etc., saying that I was right and should NEVER give my phone number to Facebook, no matter how much Facebook tells us it's all right.

Facebook telling us it's all right is supposed to make it all right, or at least make us THINK it's all right.It isn't. All right.

Phone numbers and a lot of other personal information is for sale on the Internet, and Facebook, or, sorry, no, somebody PRETENDING to be Facebook, might be selling it even as we speak. This information is being tossed to advertisers like herrings to hungry sea lions.

That's still not the worst thing. This yellow bar won't go away and is still sitting at the top of my Facebook page and has no "no" option, though it appears to. It has a "dead" x that does nothing in the corner, giving you the illusion you have a choice and can turn it down if you want to. You can't. You can't even click it away so you don't have to look at the stupid mocking piss-yellow thing any more.

But it gets even worse. In trying to write a blog post about that yellow bar and the evil it represented, that selfsame yellow bar (incredibly) transferred itself to the top of my blog home page. It was greyed out so I couldn't get rid of it or do anything with it. At all. I know it was the Facebook yellow bar because it had the Facebook "head" symbol on the left side, but no lettering on it. Then Internet Explorer told me I didn't even have a blog any more, that it had been completely wiped. I clicked around and managed to accidentally delete the post I've been working on all day. It's gone. But the grey/yellow bar is gone, too.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED HERE?????

Like a virus, that unwanted "invitation" to give my phone number to Facebook jumped to my blog home page and destroyed a post about me NOT wanting to give them my phone number.

From the Deep Web (a sort of Twilight Zone of creepy cyberstories) to the Cloud, which may or may not actually be suspended in the sky, the internet just gets scarier. Soon it will develop consciousness, like HAL in the movie 2001, and spew astronauts out in space with no oxygen supply.

Meantime my magnificent post about Facebook's attempt to hijack and pirate my privacy has disappeared. Hey, I'M not saying Facebook had anything to do with this. But it's possible their little ghouls read my mind, or my blog, and decided to wipe the whole thing clean.

Or not. But FUCK how I hate having to reconstruct a post which I KNOW will never be as good as the original.

POST-BLOG GLOB: So here's what they told me! Facebook's "response" to my query about their request for my phone number:

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. We’re constantly trying to improve Facebook, so it's important that we hear from the people who use it. Unfortunately, we can’t respond to your emails individually, but we are paying attention to them. We appreciate you taking the time to write to us.

If you're having any problems with your account, please visit the Help Center (http://www.facebook.com/help) where you'll find information about Facebook as well as the answers to many of your questions.

Thanks again for your feedback,
The Facebook Team

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"Why didn't this catch on??"

Why, why,why, you may ask yourselves,WHY didn't these brilliantly innovative inventions catch on? Why do we not see them today as we stroll down the street? Why must they be consigned to the dusty halls of Pinterest? It is difficult to imagine why the Turkey Wagon didn't catch on. Keeping two turkeys is so much cheaper than a pony, though their sense of direction might be erratic.

Are these sound amplification devices? Small strap-on mobile cannons? Some bizarre sort of plumbing system involving attaching people's heads together? Or merely a strange precursor to the Mickey Mouse Club?

The whole trouble with Pinterest and all those Top Ten Most Horrible sites is that they don't give you any background, and if they do it's either wrong or just a wild-ass guess. So I might as well make my own wild-ass guess and say this is a bottom-pincher which can stretch out to a full capacity of twelve miles. The figure operating it is a pervert.

The Isolator, The Isolator! I found so many pictures of The Isolator, and I still do not know what The Isolator is or might have been. Looks like something Michael Jackson might have used, or perhaps the end of a giant twinkie. A tank of some unknown gas, purported to be oxygen, rests on the desk.

This is beautiful, even though I do not understand it. I don't know if this was an experimental prototype, or if Isolators roamed the streets back in the 1920s.

This would, in fact, be very isolating. Small children might run screaming. I am trying to figure out what all those gizmos are on Hugo's desk. Perhaps they are merely props to make all this look terribly scientific and distract you from the fact that this headgear is bloody useless.

THE ISOLATOR!

This woman is encased in something called the Swimming Machine. She appears to be strapped or perhaps bolted in, while her girl friend cranks the crank that makes the something-or-other, the contraption, the Swimming Machine, force her arms and legs into gyrations approximating swimming. I like this, but I don't like to think what might happen when the tide comes in.

This is the precursor to those bloody videos where a dog is supposed to be eating dinner, and you know it's all faked because a dog NEVER does that with a fork and spoon. This dog seems to be holding a rifle.

That square thing at the top, first of all, has a face. Are you one of these people who sees faces in everything? It's a malevolent being with dials for eyes and a pressure-gauge for a nose, and like the gas meters of my childhood it terrifies me. The guy is boiling his feet off for reasons we don't know, or trying to keep busy or keep his hands off himself, and his feet off himself too. Victorians.

This is even better. It's the Schnee Bath, in which a man bathes his Schnee while two fetching nurses look on. The fact he needs two medical attendants while undergoing the Schnee Bath is alarming. Wires appear to be running from that ominous-looking box straight into the buckets of bath water. This guy's going to do a Thomas Merton any time, and they'll have to peel him off the ceiling.

People like to strap things on their head. You see it all the time. This thing looks like it could explode at any minute. It's a fire-extinguisher, actually, like in the horrible old Victorian school I went to, the one that had a sign on it that said DO NOT TOUCH. People were literal enough back then, and so afraid of authority, that if the entire school were in a conflagration, no one would have touched that fire extinguisher because it had a sign on it that said DO NOT TOUCH. And I would be dead and not writing this.

Look carefully at the blobby thing on top of the woman's head. It's the back view of an alien, with its long skinny arms and legs wrapped around her face. It is eating her brain, but she has not noticed it yet because she is high on the fumes from the fire extinguisher.

If I had to work at a typewriter again, I think I'd wear one of these so I could scream as loud as I could and no one would hear me. If things got really bad, I could mentally control the various weapons appending from the helmet. I could fire death-rays at someone. The long tube coming out of the fellow's mouth is a vacuum cleaner hose. He's having a conversation with his buddy in the next room. My brother and I used to do that all the time, and also roll marbles and send the hamster on a little journey.

This is trick photography. This thing actually sits on the ground and does nothing.

Who needs eyeballs, when you can have implants? These fit neatly in each eye socket and completely eliminate the use of the eye. Think they're not attractive? Guess again. Available in a variety of styles and colours, 

Ice cream wagon? No. Portable oven? Hmm. The woman is wearing a gas mask, and there's this little vent-ish looking thing - . No. There could not be a baby in there.

This is one of the more unfortunate artifacts from Nazi Germany, in which infants were indoctrinated with piped-in speeches by Adolf Hitler before they could crawl. The comely Fraulein is reading Mein Kampf, also adapted into a child's first reader (Fun with Adolf and Eva).

This is obviously something that turns, right? Turns around? In a circle? Then why is the guy's head plugged into it the way it is? His head would be wrapped around this thing in about two seconds and he would be ground up into hamburger by all those gears at the bottom.  A learning device designed by Hieronymus Bosch, probably meant to punish sinners.

"You had me at hello"

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Gif of cat in bowler hat playing piano.

Alive and gay and dying in Connecticut

The young man was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Sandy red hair, just a light gold-dusting of freckles, and a graceful body he carried in a sort of princely manner. This belied the fact that he had already attempted suicide four times.

His parents hustled him to a psychiatrist, which is what you did when your child went off the rails. Nobody talked about it, but everyone knew he had to go. It was torture for him because it reminded him of the fact that he could not seem to get his life together, though he was already twenty-three.

The waiting room smelled almost as bad as a dentist’s, though at least he couldn’t hear the sound of drills. He had half-expected wails and screams, like in The Snake Pit, but so far there were none. This was 1956, after all, and he suspected such scenarios were out of date.

“Nigel.” The nurse or receptionist or nun or whatever-she-was announced his name. His number was up. He was reminded of the Negro spiritual, “There’s a man goin’ round takin’ names”. Someone had taken his name already.

The psychiatrist sat behind a huge, monolithic desk, and Nigel was just as glad, because he only had to look at half of him. He was not required to lie on a couch, although a couch was provided.

“Nigel.” The psychiatrist, Dr. March, had all the requisite diplomas on the wall. A spider appended from one of them. He opened a folder which had already been prepared for him. What could be in it?

“Your parents believe you’d benefit from some counselling, psychoanalysis perhaps.” He peered at Nigel over glasses that slid down his nose.

“I guess they think so.”

“Well, what do YOU think?”

“I’m not sure. I think I could do without it.”

“So just what sort of problems are you having?” Dr. March probably knew.

“Oh, a few problems at the university – post-graduate, you know – “

“Your parents tell me you want to go to Europe.”

“Well, see, it’s my last chance to have a few adventures before I – “

“Before you what?”

He was stumped by that one.

“Before you take up a respectable life. So you want to sow your wild oats.”

He wasn’t familiar with the expression. “Yes, sir. I mean, yes, doctor. I think so.”

“What do you plan to do in Europe?”

“I’d like to get a motorbike – “

“Motorbike?”

“Yes. It’s a – “

“I know what a motorbike is. I am curious as to why you would want to get one.”

“Can get around faster, that’s all.”

“Get around.”

“See the sights.”

“What sort of sights are you interested in?”

“Oh, Paris, Rome, that sort of – “

“What sort of companions might you have on this trip? Have you thought about that?”

“Companions.”

“This is what your parents are so concerned about. The people whose company you keep.”

This was such a convoluted way of putting it that Nigel was momentarily confused.

“Oh. You mean – like, fellow travellers and – “

“Yes. Fellow travellers.”

“Oh well. I wouldn’t know that until I got there.” Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He had to use the washroom, but wouldn’t ask, didn’t want to show that kind of weakness on the first appointment.

“Just where do you think you might meet these fellow travellers? Your parents have been concerned about the company you have been keeping.”

There was that novelist at the university, a dazzler really, and Nigel had been so in love with him that his teeth ached. And the prof, simply brilliant, but even worse because he was so completely unattainable. There had also been a couple of covert meetings in bars, their locations by necessity conveyed in a sort of secret code.

“I’ve got friends. I mean – “

“What sort of friends?”

“We have similar interests.”

“Nigel, I will not beat about the bush here. Your parents have sent you here because they have seen evidence that you might possibly have homosexual tendencies. This is a serious mental disorder which should be addressed while you are still in your young manhood, so that there is a greater chance it can be arrested.”

“Arrested.”

“Yes. Though we used to believe it could be eradicated, the measures required were drastic, often involving castration and the use of hormones. This was, of course, only used in criminal cases.”

Nigel could feel his balls contract. He was pushed against the wall. Don’t be a homosexual, don’t.

“Thus a trip to Europe is not a desirable possibility at this moment, when you are just beginning to experience this impulse and might be tempted to act upon it.”

“I haven’t acted upon it,” he lied, putting a sweet expression on his face, an expression that had been plastered on there for a long time.

“Good! Good! That is a very good sign, and indicates you are motivated to resist your feelings and thus take the first steps toward mental health.”

If his reaction to his lie was “good, good!”, then obviously his reaction to the truth would be “bad, bad!” or some variation thereof.

“But doctor, you know, I know some people who – that is, they’ve made the adjustment – “

“These people live outside of society. They are on the fringes of acceptability.”

“I know a poet. Met him through somebody at the university.”

“Exactly right.”

“His name is Allen. Allen Ginsberg. He wrote this poem that – “

“Exactly right! One must contemplate the level of income one can expect from a poem.”

“It’s called Howl.”

“Strange name for a poem. Not exactly Wordsworth, is it?”

“No.” He shifted in his chair, his need to void his bladder really bad now, but he had to hold out.

“Your parents believe it would be in your best interests to spend the summer with your grandparents in Connecticut. Lots of odd jobs you can do there. Meet people your own age, that sort of thing.”

Young men? Nigel thought. No, he couldn’t mean that.

“I’m not much interested in Connecticut, doctor.”

“It’s not a question of what you are interested in, Nigel. Quite the opposite. Your parents believe, and my professional opinion is in agreement, that your priority should be suppressing these alarming impulses you have been having before they rise up and assume a life of their own.”

“And this will happen in Connecticut.”

“More likely there than buzzing around on a motorcycle in Paris and Rome.”

“So I’ll end up marrying a nice girl?”

“There’s a greater chance of it, if we start now. We’ve had lots of success stories. Men have learned to quell these impulses and keep them under control for a lifetime.”

“But what sort of effort does it take?”

“Effort? Of course it takes effort. It takes ongoing effort to overcome any major psychiatric disorder. Most men have controlled it through constant vigilance.”

“Vigilance.” Sounded like a very romantic term. Lying next to a woman he didn’t love, sneaking out after she had gone to sleep.

“I am going to put you on some medication to help calm you and get these impulses under control. It is only then that we can begin this work, which I warn you will be long and difficult.”

“What about Connecticut? Will I be ready for Connecticut?”

The doctor, dense as he was, picked up the merest thread of sarcasm, even satire, and didn’t like it.

“Connecticut will be dealt with when the time is right.”

Right. He had the prescription now, and a plan. He realized that it was necessary, if one was to be successful, to commit suicide twice.

Slash your wrists, then hang yourself.

Take the pills, then jump off the bridge.

Shoot yourself in the head just as the train bears down on the tracks.

He could mix and match any way he wanted. It was the only safe way to do it, guaranteeing success. You would never pull through.

It would solve the problem neatly and elegantly. You can’t know poets like that, for heaven’s sake, and get married and pretend. The possibilities were too horrendous.

He wanted to make his parents sorry. But his parents would not be sorry. They would be full of pity and reassured only that their son had been intractably mentally ill, and that there was nothing anyone could have done.

He jumped on the bus, walked to the back, juggling possibilities. Take pills, jump off, shoot yourself. Slash, hang, train. It was like a Chinese restaurant, elegantly simple, one from column a, one from column b.

All he had to do was pick two.

"You had me at hello"

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harold redux

I wish I knew who drew this - as usual, I can't find the provenance of it. Thank you, whoever you are, this gives me joy.

Harold walking along the beach at the estate of William Randolph Hearst.

A curiosity, in which a makeup artist transforms himself (supposedly) into various celebrities, including Harold who does some fancy moves.

Harold had superb balance,coordination and reflexes. And it's a good thing. The drop wasn't as extreme as it looks, but he still could have fallen six feet and hurt himself.

Facebook: "I have so many friends, I'm SWAMPED!"

Actual Facebook post from an actual Facebook friend, actually read by me this morning.

"What is going on with FACEBOOK? I'm getting inundated with "friend" requests. If you have referred someone to my page and I've declined, I apologize BUT I only have just over 200 "slots" left. Please invite your friends to follow my FB page, "like" my Watchdogz page, and check out for my website which is coming out late next month. They can also view my book trailer (please repost the link). Thanks to the many authors who have connected with me and lent me some good advice, shown me some phenomenal reading material, and have been "friends." I hope you will continue on this journey with me."

For reasons that have to do with self-preservation only, I will withhold the name of the person who wrote this Facebook post. But I think it's a brilliant example of casual, tossed-off narcissism expressed as irritation: oh, those pesky fans of mine! Why must they overwhelm me with their petty requests to be my friend? As if they think they are close enough to my lofty status to "friend" me. I'm almost at the 3000 upper limit, for God's sake. Have they no manners? Don't they realize that the last 200 friend "slots" must be filled by people I love, cherish and see face-to-face every day (just like the other 2800), not to mention people who are good for my career? I have forgotten how to refuse friend requests, by the way, which gives me a very good excuse to complain about it here.

But then comes the topper. This whiny  post which is so disdainful and even contemptuous of her fans then switches to blatant advertising for her new web site and her books. Then her tone seems to miraculously settle down, maybe because this message has been sent out in one form or another about 50,000 times. Having prepared the ground by letting everyone know what a literary superstar she is, she then moves in for the kill.

I see this sort of thing all the time on FB: sometimes phony irritation about those pesky people who debase themselves with abject adulation, sometimes phony humility ("I don't know how this ever happened - it seems impossible - I know I probably don't deserve it - but GUESS WHAT, guys! I just won the Giller Prize. Yippee!"). One strange one I saw went sort of like, "I hate having to do this - it just tortures me every day, but I HAVE to do it, it's part of a writer's burden. My publisher insists that I promote myself, so it's not my fault. They insist I talk about the, no, I won't say it,that I announce to everyone, not that I want to, my nomination for the Gasbag Award for 2015."

There are twists of double, triple and quadruple meaning here, all of them veiling a narcissism that causes a level of nausea in me equivalent to spraying an entire can of Reddi-Whip in my mouth at once. Nobody's straight about it. The petty foot-stomping over all those presumptuous fans is the worst, but I've also seen things like, "I apologize to all my friends in advance. I'll be taking some time off Facebook for some much-need R & R. Be back in an hour." One went, "My email is down and is going to be down for the next half-hour. Please message me on FB - not all at once, please, I can't possibly get through them all! - or email my overflow email, or my overflow-overflow email, or just sit there and miss me for half an hour. Or better yet, go on my fan page or buy my book on Amazon and give me five stars. OK?"

The published authors are snooty, the "famous" published authors who actually have an income are astonishingly, headshakingly vain and narcissistic. I don't know how many times I've seen links to artlcles such as, "Why it's so heartbreaking to fail as a writer," which consists of a few paragraphs about what it's like to be hopeless loser who never gets anywhere because they don't know what the hell they are doing. Then comes the REAL article: how I beat the curse of being a hopeless loser and got a $250,000.00 advance on my next novel that isn't even written yet. So what the hell is going on here? "Yes, OK, I know how it must feel to be a total failure, happens to the best of us, and it might even have happened to ME, except, you see, I know what the hell I'm doing. And you don't."

Say what you mean, people. If you're a failure, poop it out. If you're successful, march around with a banner. Just don't be so goddamn devious, please - you are making me sick.


Post-blog blob. Just thought of something that happened quite a few years ago at a writer's workshop. A novelist, best-selling by Canadian standards - i. e. a few thousand copies - was telling us all about the perils of fame, and what a nuisance her fans can be. She told us a story to illustrate this. After doing a reading from her latest best-selling novel featuring a dysfunctional Canadian family living on a broken-down prairie wheat farm in the 1800s, with the mother giving birth to a stillborn baby in the barn, etc. etc., a fan came up to her and said, "I just wanted to tell you that your reading brought back all sorts of vivid memories for me. Your character Mac McMackintosh reminded me so much of my great-grandfather and his stories of the Great Grasshopper Plague of 1892." 

The author looked at us in horror with a sort of shrinking-back, dread-mixed-with-disgust body posture and said in a whiny voice, "I don't want to get involved with these people and their traumatic memories! I have nothing to do with their dysfunctional families! I don't want to hear about how my work triggered whatever-the-hell in them. That's none of my affair and they should know that." (Eye-roll, shrug)"Honestly." Composing herself, rearranging her poofy

hair and straightening her I-don't-really-need-these glasses: "Besides, it was crickets."

BLOG BADDA-BOOM! A follow-up to the follow-up to the quote from my anonymous friend's Facebook page. I am sure she has no idea of the staggering level of narcissism and entitlement expressed in her post. But it would be no fun without it!:

"Wow, this has been an eventful 24 hours. First of all, I have had to decline so many friend requests the past week as I have been swamped. Unfortunately, some people are not happy about this. I invite everyone to follow my FB page, "like" my Watchdogz page, and keep an eye out for my website which is coming out late next month. Facebook places a 5,000 person limit on "friends" and of course, we know this can be difficult. As of writing this message, I have 188 spots left and have been trying to carefully select people who I feel will genuinely be supportive to me as an author and will continue on this journey of my mystery/thriller adventures."

"Over the last couple of days, I have sadly lost a longtime "personal" friend who has accused me of "poaching" from his friend list to develop my own friends and demanded that I cancel them from my account. I value all of my FB friends and I have contacted each and everyone of the formerly (I have blocked him from my page) 60 mutual "friends," that we shared and advised them of the situation, inviting them to "unfriend" ME if THEY so desire. This individual is attempting to get me "banned" from Facebook and has launched a very vicious attack on my integrity. I would like to say, I value all of my friends, am responsive to their thoughts and comments and do not wish to intrude on people who think otherwise. Please feel free to "unfriend" me if you so choose (although, I hope you won't) as I am also feeling strained by people requesting to join my page that I have had to regrettably decline.

Phew! I thought, that I would enjoy my retirement and hopefully entertain some people with the stories (that my personal friends all know) I love to tell.

Blessings to all,

Narcisse A. Nonnee-Mousse

P.S. This is my book trailer: 

(removed by blogger)

You know, I have all those same problems, but I have decided to raise my maximum number of friends to 7 billion, thus taking in all those poor Third World souls who need my enlightenment. Sorry this is so long, I just had to include that last, noisome entry. The author, having been unfriended by me, now must scramble frantically for a replacement to top up her list. Such a hemorrhage! Oh well, she told me I could do it.

P. S. to the P. S.: This doesn't deserve a post on its own, but it's yet another example of "oh God, poor me, I'm in such pain because I just have SO many people reading my stuff!" It's backhanded narcissism, but what dismays me is how many likes and "oh, poor baby" comments she got on Facebook. Sharyn Wolf wrote some sort of memoir about being a shrink (!?) whose marriage broke up, and oh God, more than 250 (NOT 249, NOT 251, though it's likely up to 2500 by now) people sniped at her for writing such a shallow useless thing. ONE person said she liked it, but it was Cher, so it kind of negated all the criticisms. If you believe in love. . .

Sharyn Wolf Oh, sadly, this is true. I had more than 250 comments--a surprising fight between a bunch of people who thought I should be drawn and quartered against one kind soul who claimed that English teachers don't have to publish a novel to teach writing. I read an interview with Cher about a million years ago, where she said that with 50 great reviews, she only recollects the few horrid ones. I learned recently that we cling to those because our brain is velcro with the bad stuff and teflon to the good.

"You had me at hello"

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What a good cat, what a smart cat, what a pretty cat