RIP, HCFM

Do you ever start out on the internet with good intentions, but later find yourself having been led astray? I don't just mean going down a rabbit hole, but a close cousin of rabbit holing where you start out with lofty intellectual reasons for going online but later find yourself having been lured into an opinion piece from 2018 about Henry Cavill's moustache. Similar to a rabbit hole, except you can literally feel yourself growing stupider: "Wait a second, didn't I come here to find out more about Denisovan DNA? What does that have to do with Henry Cavill's moustache?"

Probably something to do with interbreeding, because that man is clearly of a different species, moustache or no. He he.

Note that it is not Henry Cavill's moustache per se that makes you stupider, but rather this ridiculous supplemental thought is what finally pushes that one clever little neuron that inspired you to go online at 8 o'clock this morning completely over the edge and it just smashes the ol' apoptosis button out of sheer frustration and *poof* - you're a little bit dumber now than you were when you started, and also somehow missing two hours of your life? But by golly you are now armed with an opinion about Henry Cavill's former moustache, RIP, so I guess there's that.

After this example you may want to label this phenomenon a simple horny tax, but please note that it isn't necessarily about Henry Cavill's moustache - that was just the first thing that popped to mind. For, um, no particular reason. It could really be anything, as there is a great deal of stupid shit on the internet that I have been sucked in to. Neither horny taxing nor rabbit holing quite capture it. I'm actually thinking it's more along the lines of... devolution. Which of course isn't really a "thing", evolution-ari-ly speaking (honestly, I'm too dumb now to know whether that's actually a word), but I think it could be a thing if you're talking about delving into the intertubes and coming out the other end legitimately stupider. I'm just gonna go ahead and call it a thing.

When Small Fry was just wee he once said to me, "Sometimes I say to myself, Myself, sometimes you're a little bit darnit." I think of that a lot, because sometimes I'm a little bit darnit, too. Since reading some articles about toxoplasmosis a few years ago I've been pinning a goodly quantity of my own darnit-ness on that. I mean, I've always been a cat person, and it's so much nicer to blame one's peccadilloes on a potentially brain-altering parasite than imagining oneself as having poor impulse control or foresight, right? But if my proposed internet-engendered devolution is a thing, which it definitely is now (see prev. parag.), I can take the heat off of cats and point to the internet as the source of all my darnit. Win-win!

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, thanks, Henry Cavill's Former Moustache, not only for improving the reputation of our feline friends, but also for enlightening me to... well, to several things I did not know about myself before this morning.

(Or was it the Toxoplasma gondii driving my brain that made me say all this? Mwuhahaha!)

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)