Why oh why (I've always wanted to type that) do people add nauseating twee rubbish to photo sequences and stuff before they send them winging their way round the Interwebnet? Just send me the bl**dy pictures if you must but please don't add some moralising or advisory cack to it or I may have to come round and throw up in your front garden. (Only joking, Colin.) (Or am I? muahahaha arrrgh blurrgghhh oops sorry.)
Example - please have a look at a rather amazing sequence of photos. To save my thrusting a whole email message at you, here's a nice clean web version, presented by the ever-useful and brilliant snopes.com:
Unusually for "stuff" doing the rounds these appear to be real, not some sad fake: better and better. I really enjoyed seeing this in the email I was sent ... almost to the end ... so why oh why (yeah!) did some WAZZOCK have to add this tripe to the bottom of the message before sending it out to 39 million people?
There is a moral to this story you know; this old bear made a wrong move and found he was hanging by his nails. Somehow he was able to pull himself up onto the ledge where he saw he was in a very bad, impossible situation and what did he do? Yep, he took a nap and sure enough the situation took care of itself while he was asleep. The moral is, that when confronted with a bad situation, sometimes the best solution is to take a nap . . .
Ohhh nausea, tweeness, yukkk, death just claim me now .... Please, surely it is legal for me to identify the author of these words and go and pour cold custard down their trousers till they beg for mercy? What sort of person writes stuff like this? What is the point? Do they think they are the only person on the planet who can see a metaphor? Or that this is such a richly original insight that I will actually put a tutu and a tiara on and run round shrieking for joy because I couldn't have thought that up on my own? And did the friend who sent me it - who I think does vaguely know me and has done for more than twenty years - think I'd go, "wow, yeah, excellent advice about the nap, thanks mate"?
I am ... just ... entirely ... gah!
There is a moral to this story you know; this old bear is fed up with emailed cack. Send me the link, or just send me the photos, or send me nothing at all, but don't send me twee bl**dy rubbish telling me to take a nap. The moral is, that when confronted with a bad email, sometimes the best solution is to identify the author and puke in their garden.
Oh (but please see update below) and I would love Snopes a lot more for publishing that "straight" version of the story had they not also committed this horrible dangling participle howler:
After securing a net under the bridge the bear was tranquilized...
Really? Really? Very very clever bear that. And please don't try to do a gag about the dangling and the bear - you know it is bad for us both and that no benefit will come of it to your house or mine. Just say no.
Before anyone writes to point out how old hat this all is, and how there is too much of it and how I will go mad (read: even madder) if I think I need to blog about every instance of it that annoys me, yes yes fine I know thank you Tamsin. Just this one and it can serve for all the others. OK? Thank you, over, and (as they wrongly say) out.
Update: I owe Snopes an apology. I'm an idiot. They were quoting the original text of the example they'd collected, so the dangling participle was not their error, but that of the original author. Quite rightly for a sort of virtual museum they do not amend original texts, just display them. Sorry Snopes, my silly mistake.
Update 2: Yes, I'm slightly less angry now than last night. :)
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