Fakebook

I had a very nice chat with one of my hundreds of friends on Facebook yesterday.  She initiated the chat, and something was different, but I couldn’t figure out what nagged at me until much later.

After a few sentences she started telling me how bad things were.  I couldn’t quite understand what was going on, because she and her family moved to Perth from South Africa a few years ago, and they were quite happy as far as I know.

So she went on and told me someone robbed her in a violent attack in a park in Kentish town.  I had no idea where Kentish town was, as I’ve never even heard of a park like that in Perth.
So I asked her where this park was.  London, she says.  So I ask her what the hell she’s doing in London?
She responded:

i went there to visit a resort
it was a brutal experience, all cash i had on me were stolen and my credit card was collected too

By now I already realised that something was not adding up.  See, this friend is Afrikaans and she would not have told me a hair-raising story like this in English.  And I seemed to remember that she was in Fremantle as recently as Sunday – it was actually still on her profile statement on Facebook.

So I responded in Afrikaans, which is her first language.  She actually responded correctly to the question, but answered me in English, which did not make sense.  She also added that her husband was with her – why would she then contact me for help, if her husband was sitting next to her and she did not mention any of his credit cards also getting stolen? 

In the meanwhile I got hold of her phone number and gave her a ring.  Yep, she’s in Perth all right - happy as can be, with no idea that someone else was busy scamming money off people on her behalf.

Imagine you would be stupid enough to help someone financially, only to find out that they’re actually not even in London, and that your money is long gone?  I wonder how many idiots fall for these scams?

So - be warned, if your “friend” contacts you on Facebook and asks for money, make sure it’s really your friend.  If it really is one of your real-life friends, chances are they wouldn’t corner you on Facebook for a few bucks.  (Not my friends, anyway.) 

And remember to change your password regularly so that you don’t end up with ex-friends beating you up about money that you supposedly owe them…

Weird science

Sometimes I really wonder how science (or scientists, rather?) actually achieved anything during the last two centuries. How did we end up in a world where technology dictates and regulates everything, considering that some of the world’s top scientists are loonies?

Thank God for engineers – those amazing people who abuse science for practical purposes. Otherwise we would all be sitting in our mud huts dreaming of floating cities and flying saucers, and lusting for hairy green women from some fictional planet, while eating raw meat that we killed with a rock.

One can only wonder how some people legally obtain their doctor’s degrees? It must be the same type of doctor’s degree that Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma worked so hard for. (Not doctor, but “doktah”…)

This clown says that “nature” defies the laws of nature and moves backward in time so that it can stop the Hadron Collider experiment from occurring.

This opens up a massive can of worms. (Or should that be “worm-holes”?)

After Obama won a Nobel peace prize for upscaling the war in Afghanistan and making good speeches, this guy probably realised that he would really have to go off the deep end if he wanted to win the Nobel Science prize. What better option than to advocate goofy science fiction? I’m sure the old boys in Norway are already feverishly comparing notes about their next candidate for the Nobrain Science prize.

They’ve got it all in this conspiracy – time travel, Armageddon, awesome catastrophes, a 27km tunnel and great sci-fi words like “Higgs particles”, “paradox”,”particle accelerator” and of course the ever-lurking menace that is called the “opening of black holes”.

One can only imagine what all these things could mean when they’re thrown together in a pot and mixed together in an 11.2 billion dollar machine that also boasts it’s own al-Quaeda spy.

Some of today's scientists sound a lot like the old druids and wizards, mixing a little bit of factual science with a lot of fairy tales and magic.

What is this universe coming to?

Apparently time travelling is not as far-fetched as some of us common folk would believe. Even back in 1943 the US army was able to travel back in time for 10 seconds, and they also teleported a ship 120 miles away.

This has, of course, all been filed under the Philadelphia experiment conspiracy theory archives, along with great stories from Area 51 and the fake Moon landing.

Oh, and then there is the digital television conspiracy. Apparently, “the mandatory switch to digital television is a smokescreen for a Big Brother society because of cameras built-in to set top boxes.”

Yikes, at least I can leave the kids alone at home, because the government will be looking after them while I’m gone. Shopping is going to get much easier from now on.

Maybe I should do some forward time travelling and see if this whole Global Warming thing is true…

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”…

So much for following the rules

I previously mentioned how I had to struggle to convert my Namibian drivers licence.

Now I see there’s a much easier way.

Just tell the magistrate that you’re from Africa, and have no idea how to catch a bus, and whalla – you’ll get issued with a special licence!

Things like this really irritate me.  I had to go through hell to convert a perfectly legitimate licence, even though I’ve never even had as much as a parking fine in WA.

This guy drives under the influence, wrecks a car, assaults a police officer (which, by the way, just the other day was made punishable by going straight to jail, directly to jail, don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200?), but he gets this rap on the fingers and the “poor old sports hero” treatment.

This sucks.  I think I should get some legal advice – I’m sure there is grounds for discrimination in all of this.  I mean, if they really believe the Hey-Hey show to be repulsively racist, this must be ranked close to genocide on a mass scale.

Nature calling?

I am one of those weird people who just absolutely hate telephones.  I hate ringing up people, and I hate answering a phone.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a landline or a mobile – I don’t wanna talk.  My wife says talking to me on the phone is like talking to a rock. 

I’ll send off thousands of emails to anyone who is not interested.  If you email me, you will get a response.  What I hate, is when people don’t respond to my emails.  That’s just plain rude.

But try ringing me, and chances are good I won’t even answer.  I do like mobile phones because they can tell me who's calling – now I know for certain that I don’t want to pick up the phone.  I just love that “silence” button – or better yet, the red one.

But some people are the exact opposite.  Some really go off the deep end with the way they abuse the privilege of being able to use Alexander Graham Bell’s invention to it’s full extent.

The other day at work, I was busy washing my hands in the men’s room.  I heard this guy’s phone ringing inside his “cubicle”.  He actually answered it in there.  He started yapping away, like he was sitting on his couch at home or something.  And then, believe it or not, I heard him flushing the toilet – still talking happily while he was doing it, of course. 

It got worse.

He exited his cubicle, and went on to wash his hands – still yapping away without a care in the world.  He moved along to the paper towel dispenser, and somehow managed to dry off his hands while discussing some serious topic.

He finally walked out of the men’s room – still yapping.

Now this is totally uncool.  In the first place, how the hell can we be sure he really washed his hands decently?  Yuck, I don’t even want to think about it. 

I hate germs and anything unhygienic.  These blokes who just fire up their barbies with last week’s fat and oil still lying there give me the creeps.  I saw one bloke who had a garden snail on his barbie – this thing walked all over the barbeque and left a nice shiny trail all over the grill.  This bloke took his BBQ thong, grabbed hold of Mr. Snail, and chucked the old squirming snail into the bin.

He then grabbed a piece of meat and a few sausages, threw them onto the barbie, and with that same snail-removal thong he continued to turn around his meat and sausages.

Needless to say I wasn’t very hungry.

If my phone rings in the WC, you won’t find me answering it.  I know where the red button is.