Today I offer an anecdotal snapshot of how hard it is to get paid to do anything in the current economy. The following took place only minutes ago:

I’ve been signed up with Focus Pointe and another couple of market research companies for well over a year now. They email me a couple of qualification questionnaires a week, and call me maybe once a month. Not once have I so much as qualified to be on one of their little consumer panels. I’m beginning to wonder if they are really conducting any market research panels, or if they just enjoy teasing me with illusory offers to pay me for my opinion.

Or, in tweet-speak: #societyepicfail

Pictured below is a perfectly ordinary Facebook conversation from this morning on the topic of economic inflation. I couldn’t resist an opportunity for wiseass humor — also perfectly ordinary. What I had not seen before was Facebook advertising pages to me based on keywords I had just typed. This screenshot is from immediately after I had posted the “inflamed shins” comment:

I swear, upon my honor, I did not photoshop in that Tibia thing.¹ Facebook really said they have 978 people who are “fans” of the shin bone. And you know what? In hindsight, I wish I had clicked through to see this alleged Facebook page of Tibia devotees, because I’ve gone back and searched and it’s not there. What the face, Fuckbook?

Here’s what I do find there:

1. There is, unsurprisingly, a Facebook page for the indie band The Shins, who are at least popular enough for me to have heard of them (and I’ve never been one of the “up on all the latest and coolest music” people), and to have nearly 235,000 Facebook fans. If Facebook had popped up a recommendation for their page after my shin-related comment, it would at least have made sense to me in terms of the typically nuance-free logic generated by computers.²
2. A community page with 72 followers called Shins. Its emblem is a photo of a woman by a treadmill who appears to be rubbing her… calf. Oh-kay. The page’s “About” blurb reads,
   

   we all become fans, or like, dumb things. why not shins? why not shins…

   First of all, no — we all don’t do that. Second, “why not shins?” How about, because it’s fucking stupid? You know? That works for me.

3. Another page called Shins, with a current total of 47 fans. My best guess is that it is inspired by a garden variety fetish for women’s shins. Its label is an artsy black-and-white photo showing a pair of gleaming, well-toned, apparently female legs. The page itself lists cookies from Subway as its own “like.”
4. A page called Naturally, God Gave Us Shins To Find Furniture In The Dark. Its image is a hackneyed parody of those hackneyed “inspirational” posters that have a gauzy image inside a wide black margin bearing a white, all-caps motto. 10,550 people so far have clicked to indicate that they find it funny. I could take a jab at the self-canceling notion of something having happened “naturally” by divine action, but I’d rather move on.
5. Several pages about a swords-and-sorcery online role-playing game that is called Tibia for reasons I neither know nor have much curiosity about.



6. A page for an Eastern European rock band called Tibia, who are not well-known enough for me to have heard of and (accordingly, I guess) have 1,102 Facebook fans.
7. Finally, an “Interest” page called Tibia bone which bears the same image as the recommendation I got. It is a reprint of the Wikipedia article for Tibia, and has a grand total of one Facebook fan. I bet he or she isn’t even an orthopedist — doctors don’t have time to fart around on Facebook. Not the ones I know, at least.

Obviously, none of these pages could possibly be mistaken for the one that Facebook recommended to me. I don’t know what’s more ridiculous: the idea of 978 people being fans of the Tibia bone, or Facebook lying about the existence of such a page in an effort to tempt me to click through to… what? I guess I’ll never know.

Some of you may have noticed that comments on recent posts have gone missing. If you haven’t noticed, I sure as hell have. Posts since November 2009 that had comments still say that they do in the meta-link at the top of the post (e.g. “2 comments,” etc.), but those comments just don’t appear at the end of the post.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong. At the moment, I cannot summon the fortitude to spend more time slogging through the WordPress support forums and troubleshooting possible fixes. I’ve just recently done many hours of that after upgrading to PHP 5, and the resultant day and a half when all my blog content was AWOL.

If it’s at all reassuring, I can tell recent commenters this:

1. I am quite sure that your comments are not irretrievably gone. Like the rest of a WordPress site’s content, they are stored in a MySQL database that underpins the site framework. Comparing the current wp_comments table in the database with a version that was backed up before this snafu, I see no appreciable difference. So it has to be a matter of mending some connective piece of code.
2. I’ve submitted test comments in the meantime to see if they stay posted, and they do. So don’t let the search and rescue operation for the previous comments discourage you from commenting now, if you’re inclined to do so.

Perhaps none of you give a shit about any of this, and this is the driest post I’ve ever written. Indeed, I may actually be trying to reassure myself: I’m always pleading and cajoling people to comment on my posts, and now those comments that have been submitted recently have disappeared with an audible “pop!” Not the kind of thing that encourages more comments.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Words of encouragement? Leave a comment!

[*rim shot*]

As some of you may recall, back on February 4th I put up a post which began:

It’s February 4th, assholes. Do you still actually think the city garbage men are going to pick up your Christmas tree?

Why mention it again, lo these many months later? Yes, I’m afraid so:

At this point, I’ll give these neighbors the minimal benefit of doubting they still think the garbage men are going to pick up their tree. The question, however, remains — what the fuck, you guys?

Maybe they’re colorblind, and can no longer visually detect the tree’s discolored corpse against the neutral tones of the street and the barren weed patch it lies upon. It would be nice if they turned out to be forensic botanists, conducting an experiment to find out how long it takes for a Christmas tree to completely decompose. Unfortunately, that scenario’s pleasantness doesn’t make it any likelier to be true. That leaves only the Ockham’s razor (commonly, “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”) explanation, which is that they simply don’t give a shit.

As long as I’m tossing out eponymous adages, I think I may have hit upon a new spinoff of Hanlon’s razor (“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”). Dig it:

Never attribute to either malice or stupidity that which is adequately explained by apathy.

Whaddya think? I’ve gone back and forth on whether to have the last factor be “laziness” instead of “apathy,” or the compounded “laziness or apathy,” or maybe “indifference.”

Also, if this little semi-invention is worth keeping, then what should it be called? Wood’s razor? I’m tempted to dub it something cheekier (no pun intended), like Wood’s razor burn, or Wood’s disposable razor, or (in the spirit of apathy) Wood’s saying thingy.

Suggestions? Votes? Palin-esque “refudiations?” Put ‘em in the comments!