Fausterella

Nothing is certain except death and taxes

As current UK events are illustrating, taxes are far from inevitable provided you have enough money. And my friend ciphergoth has his doubts about death too.

You know what’s certain? That the future child of David Mitchell and Victoria Coren will rule us all using the power of wit. And we won’t even mind.

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels

Definitely untrue. Garlic roast potatoes taste better than anything feels. So, depending on taste, do hot sugared doughnuts, halloumi, Batternberg cake, crème brulee, bakewell tart, lemon pudding, chocolate fudge cake with ice cream, potato dauphoinoise, calzone, spinach and ricotta tortellini, pepperoni pizza, and egg fried rice. And that’s just off the top of my head.

If Goths want to look different, why do they all dress the same as each other?

Said by people who think that a) they’re the first person ever to think of this and b) they have provided a devastating knockback to Goths everywhere. What they have in fact done is got confused about what ‘different’ means. People in defined subcultures tend to want to dress differently to the mainstream. They are largely ok with other people in their subculture looking similar to them. In fact, it’s kind of what a subculture is about. I have never seen a goth enter a club and cry ‘I must leave again! Fifty other people are also wearing a black corset, black skirt and New Rocks!’

Twitter is just people talking about what they had for lunch

The traditional media seems to be stuck on this idea, as do people who don’t use Twitter. But the important thing about Twitter is that you basically only ever see what you want to see. If you don’t like someone constantly listing sandwich ingredients in order of size, cost and yumminess, just stop following them.

Personally, I’m capable of taking a mild interest in what my friends eat, but in any case my Twitter feed is mostly full of all kinds of other things: political statements, one-liners, news, links to amusing pictures, music and tiny short stories to list a few. Yours can be too.

Be true to yourself, and thou canst not be false to any man

Even leaving aside the origin of this phrase – the pompous Polonius in Hamlet – it is provably untrue. It’s entirely possible to be true to yourself and also false to others. If you were listing a skillset for a criminal psychopath, for example, two of the top items would be ‘Really good at being true to themselves’ and ‘Excellent at lying to other people’.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Sometimes a little knowledge is exactly the amount of knowledge you want. In Trivial Pursuit, for example, I find that my ability to name exactly one cricket player or city in Peru is a definite advantage. Too much knowledge leads to choice paralysis, indecision, despair about the world and ultimately death. Apart from that last one.

Online friends aren’t real friends

You know, there’s no actual reason why a friendship can’t be sustained via writing rather than face-to-face. Plenty of Victorians did it with letters. Yes, an online friend might not be what they seem or might have ulterior motives: this is also true of in-person friends.

It’s quite likely that to my daughter’s generation, this issue won’t even parse. I didn’t use email till I was eighteen, and even I don’t see online and offline as binary opposites but as part of a continuum: FaceBook is as valid a place to say hello to someone as the pub is, and a lot easier to get to.

This complaint, incidentally, often seems to shade into ‘online friends aren’t real people’. I can assure you they almost always are, and will be until robots finally reach the stage where they can fool us into thinking they’re human, at which point we’ll have bigger problems than any social media can provide.