So...
With the end of the world finally here, it’s time for a
few frank admissions. Starting now…
I don’t write this blog. Every line is written by three blokes in
Sri Lanka who I pay eight bucks a month to write cutting satire and insightful
observational comedy. They say hi, and thanks for liking the "Weekend at Bernie’s" one so
much. It’s their fave.
"Good work fellas. Keep the Kanye gags coming."
Most of my Facebook friends are imaginary. Specifically, T, D
and B (seriously, how many real people have you met called ‘Mhaistone’?), Steve
D (the imaginary baby sister I always wished I’d had), Kelly D (nooobody
is that nice in real life), Brent H (who is basically how I imagine myself if I
had friends, talent and a degree in cosmology. And Tourette’s), Ed G (essentially
a blend of me, Bear Grylls and Beavis slash Butthead) and Sherrill R (who is my
perfect imaginary lunch companion: “Do you want that last Shanghai dumpling? No…?
Thanks!”). Everyone else? You are totally real. But you are imagining me.
Most of the advertising spam you receive is from me. I type
every message out myself, crafting it to dig fish hooks into your psyche
and secretly steer you towards my clients’ product/website/frozen banana stand
on Cottesloe Beach. You know how sometimes a web page pops up you don’t
remember searching for? That’s me, invisibly pulling your strings. Or when you
take a wrong turn looking for your aunt’s place and end up in front of a
run-down shopping strip with a travel agent that only sells tickets to Nigeria?
Me again. In fact I’m doing it now: two weeks after reading this, you will
receive a box of cheap Viagra you don’t remember ordering.
Bear Grylls is nowhere near as awesome as everyone thinks. I
do most of his stunts. He still does the cool leapy-swimmy-climby stuff; by ‘stunts’
I mean ‘eating bugs’, ‘sleeping in camels’ and ‘drinking his pee’. All the REALLY hard stuff.
"Twist of lemon mister Grylls?"
I wrote ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. It was easier than you might
think: I just set up my dictation software and put the microphone in a room
with two cats fighting over a pork chop.
"Oh my!"
There are almost no real people on Twitter. It’s just a
large-scale Turing test I set up, to see if a computer could write well enough
to convince people to follow it. Tragically, there are now so many spambots on
Twitter that it is simply a bizarre merry-go-round of computer programs trying
to convince other computer programs to send their bank details to Nigerian
princesses. What I can’t figure out is why the program is ordering all that
Viagra.
You CAN get rich at home using your computer, acai berries
WILL make you thin, you CAN lose belly fat using this one weird tip, there ARE
singles in your area looking for love right now, and you really have won the
New York Grand Lottery first prize of eighty million dollars. Unfortunately you
will die of aspartame poisoning, get bitten by a Mexican jumping spider, be chloroformed
by two strangers offering ‘perfume’ in a shopping centre car park, or get
cancer from mobile phones, power lines, margarine, plastic food containers,
disposable chopsticks, soy products or New Car Smell before you can take
advantage on any of this.
Damn You Autocorrect: that’s me, every time. You actually send the message you think you typed, but I intercept it and modify your text so the recipient gets a completely different dickweasel.
The Mayan calendar is my work. That was meant to be a blog
entry about how we should do our work calendar in base thirteen because it
would make it easier to calculate four weeks annual leave (a thirteenth of a
year). I didn’t finish it because somebody sent me the link to Gangnam Style
and I spent three weeks trying to learn the dance (‘left left left, right right
right, left, right, r…DAMMIT!’) Also, it was really hard to get that big round
rock back into the printer.
Righto, I can hear the sirens wailing, the meteors exploding
overhead, the rising oceans gushing into the basement and the earthquakes
rending tectonic plates as Dread Cthulhu/the Mayan God Bolon Yokte’ K’uh rises
from his ancient slumber. Time to don the Mayan-proof underwear and head for
the Snopes Bunker. Thanks all for reading, and I’ll see you next…
Oh. Right.
