The entire internet was invented so old people could forward ridiculous emails to their entire contact lists and overachieving (and probably medicated) stay-at-home moms can post pictures of food they cooked for their adoring families. Forget that whole “global launch system” and the stock market, no. The internet is really just for other people’s amusement. And I am powerless to stop it.
If I had the brainpower to write a computer virus, there is one person in particular who would be in grave danger of receiving a malicious email from me. I can’t just block her emails because there is a slight chance I might be mentioned in her will since I was her oldest grandchild’s babysitter, and with the economy in the condition it’s in, I can’t afford to burn any bridges. Apart from the ten emails a day that she forwards that were stolen straight out of Paul Harvey or Reader’s Digest, sometimes sharing a funny story but more often than not accusing Obama of being both a Muslim and the Anti-Christ and sometimes a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan (let that one sink in), she sends out her own original emails entitled, “Happy Thought for the Day.”
First, if you’ve read this blog for more than a week, you would know that I don’t appreciate any unsolicited offers of Happy Thoughts that don’t include Valium.
Second, don’t lie to me on the internet. Despite my daughter’s new favorite commercial with the “they can’t put stuff on the internet that isn’t true” dummy, don’t press FORWARD on crap that is just so blatantly a lie that you become a liar by association. Today’s Happy-Thought-I’m-A-Liar example:
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.”- LES BROWN
FALSE. Stop lying to people with false hope. The nearest star (after the Sun, of course) is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star located at a distance of 4.2 light-years away. Even if you were lucky enough to have a rocket in your backyard and clearance to launch, you would die of suffocation and starvation before you made it there. Your carcass would be raisiny and perfectly preserved from lack of decomposition as it floated around the universe for all time under its own frictionless direction. Basically, that quote right there is giving you permission to try to go to the moon but to also be such a monumental screw-up that you waste billions of dollars on your own space program only to go flying right past the moon (probably due to a math error… or possibly a geography error) and end up really hungry and gaspy before dying in a tin can you built out of spare parts.
And THAT is my Happy Thought for today? Someone please write me a virus, quickly.*
*NOTE: that request for a virus was NOT an invitation for someone to infect MY computer with the virus. Please don’t be a douche.
Lorca Damon 
I have an aunt who is constantly filling my facebook feed and my email with religiousy, optimistic bullshit but had the nerve to lecture me on my lack of propriety when a friend posted a cartoon with swearing in it! Of course I just couldn’t let it go… here’s my response: http://dcmcmillen.com/2012/05/02/trouble-on-facebook/
Remember, the whole saga where I left my church was because the pastor called me AND my husband in for a chat about how I used the word “bitch” in a Facebook post. So glad he never read the rest of my crap.
I have this really sweet neighbor lady who is always sending me emails about how she is praying for me. My first thought, every single damn time: Do you know something that I need to know? Is something bad about to happen to me? Just TELL me instead of offering me cryptic prayers. I’m not likely to show up in her will, but even so, I can’t block her because, well, I might need to borrow an egg or something at some point, and she is one of only two neighbors I actually know in this village. But yeah, she and your emailer definitely deserve viruses. The computer kind, not like actual illnesses. Or, on second thought…
*achoo*
GAH! I KNOW! It makes me really, really grateful the my dad and my mother in law don’t have computers and don’t want them. Because dear God, in heaven I already get enough crap as it is.
I can handle the disgusting cat pictures, but the political stuff makes me want to drive into oncoming traffic.
That would not be a “geography” error. If there is one thing that I remember about 7-of-9, er if there are two things, OK if there are *three* things that I remember about 7-of-9, one of them is that she worked in “Astrogation”.
That would be navigation. Not cartography. And it’s still geography because the miscalculation involves the navigation to the moon from Earth. Still “geo.”
Not a lot to do on the moon either, really. Why go there? As for landing among the stars, I think we already are or did so to speak. I mean we’re at the outer spiral arm of the Milky way, but there’s a lot of stars around us; therefore we’re among them. Finally the nearest I can get to infecting a computer with a virus is sneezing on my keyboard, so no help there I’m afraid.
Can you sneeze on the person behind the keyboard? I mean, the other lady. Not me.