As I sit in the ever-lonely command bunker of the Waspinator for President campaign headquarters, I realise I've yet to elucidate you (illiterati that you are) on what is surely the most important and burning issue of the day: this blog's audience statistics.
You may think that there might be more important things to talk about. Perhaps the fact that Donald Trump is not, in truth, a terrifying alcohol-induced dream from your college years that you've since tried to forget, but is actually a real live person who is somehow allowed to interview for the job of leader of the free world. Or perhaps the fact that we continue to use the expression 'free world' to refer, in the face of both moral and numerical sense, to the half-dozen nations on this planet keeping their own populations and the world at large in thrall to horrific, inexcusable regimes. Or the fact that we continue to ignore said horrors of late capitalism in favour of tweeting about Mel's great new shoes on the Bake Off, in much the same way that 'great novelist' Jane Austen liked to ignore not-so-late imperialism in favour of talking about picnics and tea parties.
Or, as an aside, maybe you're one of those people who think that talking about tea is Austen's way of talking about imperialism. But it's not. It's a way of talking about tea. In much the same way that tweeting about Mel's great new shoes is not a way of talking about Burma. And so, readers of the future, perhaps you wonder, as I often wonder about Jane Austen, why I would choose to ignore things that you might think actually matter and instead talk about not only the usual mundanities contained in this blog, but the statistics underpinning the mundanities contained in this blog.
And hey, don't get me wrong here, I can see where you're coming from. We could, after all, be discussing climate change, or the hundreds of species that have disappeared during our custodianship of the planet in the biggest sustained extinction event since that asteroid landed on the dinosaurs. Maybe we could be talking about the percentage of the planet that starves while good old Dave keeps British streets British, mainly by ridding them of the Scottish, the homeless, those with left-wing opinions, and people from other countries who've asked for our help. Maybe, you might well think, we could be talking about a thousand more important topics than the audience statistics of this one inane blog amidst the urine-soaked sea of inanity that is the internet.
Yes, you may think that there might be more important things to talk about. But then, as we've established on multiple preceding occasions, you're very often wrong. And in this case, as again in every preceding case, I'm going to tell you more about how very wrong you are.
For example, in a recent television advert for a certain banking company (and it doesn't really matter which one it is), targeted not quite at potential customers but instead the young and unemployed, a youthful person adopts a look of practised earnestness into the camera and offers the viewing audience of job-seekers some wonderful nuggets of advice on the important role played by the internet in the creation of a truly great cv. 'Social media', says our job-wise friend with all the prophetic insight of a modern-day Pythia, 'kind of shows people the real you.'
Now, regular readers will be aware that I would normally follow a quote like that with a suitable commentary exploring the ramifications of said quote. Instead of doing that, though, I'm simply going to sit back and repeat the quote, albeit interpolated in order that we can appropriately dwell on every drop of this wonderful material. 'Social media', the actor begins, and hold on to your hats viewers because this guy's about to really tell us something, 'kind of shows people', and wait for it good viewers because the end of this sentence is even better than the beginning and middle, 'the real you.'
You'll understand, I hope, that the main reason why I'm forced into the position of repeating the quote is because there are simply too many things achingly wrong with it, and that effectively voicing such an embarrassment of paucity in just one post-quote quip is, sadly, impossible. Some possibilities that occurred: social media does not show people the real you, unless 'the real you' happens to be an amusing meme about a really long cat. Or: social media does not show people the real you, because social media retreats from words like 'people' and 'real' while eagerly stumbling to gurn moronically at its own dribbling face. Or: do you think the poor would-be actor who landed the job of 'second person in banking company advertisement' made the best use of his social media? Or: do banking company social media accounts contain the real selves of those in charge of the banking company, and does looking straight at those accounts thus make your face melt like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
As I say, if you thought there were more important things out there than the statistics behind a blog on the internet, maybe different things I could talk about to get across what actually matters, then this particular advert is here to tell you that maybe, just maybe, you might be wrong. I mean, talking about yourself on social media can get you a job, kids, so long as the 'real you' on social media is someone who your prospective employers kind of like, and so long as both you and your employers are comfortable with the idea of their nosing through your 'real you' as if it were yesterday's copy of the Financial Times. And I mean, if social media can land you a capitalist job in the capitalist capital of a capitalist country, then maybe, just maybe, the meta-commentary provided by a discussion of the audience statistics underpinning your social media 'real you' could be the most important thing ever. Ever.
And hey, if people who go about conducting the glaringly biblical sin of usury as if it were a profession don't know what they're talking about, then who does?
Notes:
1. In the videogame Saints Row IV, players enjoy a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware narrative which includes plot points such as becoming President of the United States, combating a fairly thespian alien invasion, taking control of a virtual Earth, and having sex with a floating robot. About the only thing that I had trouble with in the game was the idea of it being narrated by Jane Austen. Not the fact that the aliens had snatched Jane Austen from her own time and that she was now narrating the story of gangland criminals turned intergalactic heroes, but the fact that she was apparently content to narrate such a story when she could, surely, have been writing about what they all had for dinner. Sometimes one can simply strain the suspension of disbelief too far.
2. Yes, I know that the title to this post bears little relation to the content. But seriously though, have you seen Star Trek: Into Darkness? Did you also like it when it repeated the plot of that Star Trek film from thirty years ago that was much better, only it didn't make sense this time around? Do you remember when you were excited to find out how Lost would end? Ha.
3. I hope you weren't really expecting anything on blog statistics. If you were, kindly get out.