The Hatchling can read - kind of...

[Scene: sitting in the hospital cafe, the Hatchling points at a sign on the wall] 

Hatchling
Dada, look! "C", "O", "F", "F", "E", "E"! 

PTR
Good reading, sweetheart!  And what word do all those letters spell? 

Hatchling
Emergency? 

PTR
Close enough.

Painbook

As has been observed before, Facebook is a stinking heap of shite, which is why I seem to be irresistibly drawn to it, like a dung beetle when the moon is full.  A quick perusal of my news feed shows me that 95% or more of the posts are:

• Videos of people's ugly kids.
• Self-evident platitudes from Paul Coelho typeset in bold over a picture of a sunset.
• Quizzes urging me to find out which inanimate object or abstract category I am most similar to.
• People bitching about football.
• People bitching about television.
• Clearly fabricated heart-warming stories about returned veterans who rescued rabbits from snow-drifts then had their legs ripped off by crocodiles moments later only to have their houses renovated by rehabilitated Malaysian slum-kids.
• Desperate pleas to adopt yet another enormous and demented-looking canine.
• Gloating about holidays.
• Exaggerated news stories about scientific breakthroughs, implying that treatments for cancer and rocket-cars are just around the corner, again.
• Desperate pleas to vaccinate your ugly kids.

I'm not saying that I'm blameless here - I've blotted my escutcheon from time to time with at least one of the sins above.  But I've just spent 20 of the richest minutes of my life scanning for comments that I've left on other people's items, and I must say, the quality of my work is impeccable.  Here is a selection of some of the comments that I left over the past weekend:

• "Those are lyrics from a Starship B-side"
• "Your appearance is illegal in Queensland."
• "What if you force-fed the glitter to the celebrities, then took their livers to make sparkly foie-gras?"
• "That depends on where that finger has been I guess."
• "Racial profiling is so 2001."
• "I'll bust my ass in your cap."
• "This sack does not contain legal tender."
• "Which one are you again?"
• "I think it's a Bavarian flipperwaldt. Or possibly Hanoverian."
• "Look ma, no hands!"
• "An extra eyeball!!!!!!"

In many cases they garnered two or even three "likes", thus simultaneously sating and stoking my narcissism.  But not only did they briefly embellish my own self-regard, they also provided a breath of fresh air to the conversation they were lobbed into, in much the same way as a drunken smart-arse at a pub, reeling from person to person and belching into strangers' faces can change the atmosphere in an instant.  My final observation though, is that they are stand-alone works of beauty and truth.  My challenge to you is this: the next time you feel the need to leave a comment on any type of social media, why not use of these modern classics instead?  And not just social media - you could send one on a post-card to your Mum, you could spray-paint it on a billboard of Tony Abbott, you could blurt it out during an early morning surgical ward round.

Every comment dies. But not every comment truly lives!