Is it Socially Acceptable to Like Yourself?

Of course, I mean on Facebook. It's socially acceptable to like yourself as a person, although if you wish to possess 'hip' qualities then it's better you skulk around in a dumpster and sing along to Okkervil River songs. If you want to think yourself funny or attractive or intelligent - feel free. This is a free society, and self-delusion is a widely-accepted form of personal repression. The moment you go on Facebook, however (Facebook is a social website where you go to see how the kid who sat opposite you in French is doing in his quest to become chairman of the student support committee for Winchester), things change. If you show any sign of being fond of yourself, people will immediately form a war commission and judge you guilty of smugness.

Why? Why do we still insist on destroying the egos of the smug and tactless? I'll admit to liking myself on many an occasion, as I make a succession of hilarious jokes and snappy one-liners on Facebook. I am endlessly fascinated by my own life, and want to make sure that as many people as possible know the extent to which I am brilliant. To investigate this further, allow me to look upon the faces of reality TV. When we watch X-Factor or Britain's Got Talent, we watch not for the struggle to be the best (most people get bored by the time of the tenth week, when everyone has started to sound alike and the main discussion is "Dannii Minogue: amazing or irritating?") but instead for the opening stages. Watching people find out they are not good at singing or being talented is where most people find their joy in the show. So what if they look sad? Did you hear that attempt at a High C? Classic!

We don't want people to delude themselves. In this age of high-class media prostitution, we require everyone to be brutally honest about their shortcomings. It may be great news that Angelina Jolie is opening up a new care centre in Africa, but did you see 'The Tourist'? Total bomb, dude! We seem to want that every act of brilliance be countered by an acceptance that there were negative side-effects. We can't be happy about someone doing something good, because their clothes clashed while they did it. Instead of celebrating the poor people who are brave enough to go on stage to pursue their dream of becoming a professional self-welder, we laugh at them for being odd or kooky. But...

Being odd and kooky is a marvellous achievement, worthy of extended merit. Facebook has that 'like' button for a reason - to celebrate individuality and silliness. Would you prefer that there was a "While proud of my achievement today, I accept that there were several drawbacks to my success which will affect me in the long-term" button? Do you want everything to conclude with a downbeat tone? Surely it's more amazing that we can say something stupid and be proud of it, aware that we're being idiots but leaving that as a subtext. I applied to be a nuclear advisor a few days ago, a job I will never get because I have no qualifications whatsoever. But it was FUN to do it! And heck, I told everyone on Facebook about my hilarious attitude towards job-hunting, and I liked the bejewelled hell out of it.


To summarise, when I 'like' one of my own posts on Facebook, it is an affirmation that I am not only brilliant, hilarious, handsome and clever... but the most individual kook you ever saw. Basically, I'm the greatest person ever. Feel free to write comments below which confirm this summary. I'll read them at my leisure, before reposting the best ones on Facebook. And 'like' them, of course.

Pixie Lott has a lovely bottom

The daughter of Natasha Bedingfield and a particularly bouffant bottle of hair gloss, Pixie Lott hails from England, where she was born. Those two things mean the same thing. Armed with a microphone hidden beneath her tongue which modulates her voice and makes her sound like a fetchingly slutty robot macaw, Pixie has transfixed Britain with her blend of melodramatic power ballads and increasingly angelic hair. While only sixteen years old, she was voted the most likely person in Britain to spontaneously dissolve and become the Ozone layer. She may not have achieved this as of yet, but her career is going from strength to strength as endless new territories fall beneath her tender heels. America has possibly been conquered, while Europe, Australia and the less racially insensitive parts of Africa are already crumbled. Why has she taken over with such rapidity? Could she be a mythical sea creature, calling out to sailors as they approach dangerous rocks and warning them of the perils of sailing near coral reefs whilst piloting a poorly-constructed hull? Or perhaps the truth is much more terrifying and scary. Perhaps it’s because she has a lovely bottom. LET’S INVESTIGATE!

We here at Wilftonville pride ourselves on our incredibly expensive forensic computers, which can calculate to the nearest galactic ounce how many brain cells are circulating your body at any given time. One of the functions on our computer system is google, so we typed in “Pixie Lott’s bum” into the system to see what came out. And boy, were we interested in the results! It appears that Pixie Lott not only has an excellent bottom, but also a large fanbase of elderly men who want to do awful things to said bottom. Could it be that people enjoy Pixie’s music for the thrill of imagining her tiny bedevilled booty popping to the bassline? We had to know more, so we typed extra ideas into google and clicked over to the pictures section. It occurred to us that if it weren’t for the fact that we are a notable crime-stopping force for good in the Universe, many would assume that we were merely looking up promiscuous photos online. Shaking the thought from our minds, we decided to investigate for images of Lott dressed as a duck, only to be thwarted. What could be going on, in this World where Pixie Lott is not interested in dressing up with a bill and short tail?

It's interesting to see how the population leans. Clicking through to google as only the most powerful of forensic computers allow you to, you can type in the name of any female singer you want and see what the internet thinks of her through pictoral form. Who would've thought that most fans of Avril Lavigne enjoy her because she helps the Environment? And yet, type her into google and this is all that comes out. Image after image of her stroking bears, riding dolphins, and healing wounded wolves with her bare hands. On the other hand, a lot of people seem to like these musicians simply because they look pretty. When was the last time you saw an ugly person singing a song? At an open mike night or a karaoke bar, no doubt. This is because ugly people are not allowed in the music industry. Even behind the scenes, the workers are incredibly attractive people like Louis Walsh. As a result, singers are half-musical and half-flirty tease who just wants to party. You may think that I am criticising the music industry. I am not. This is a congratulations. Well done music industry for keeping ugly people out of my line of sight, where they belong! Next time I leave the house and pass by a farmer's market, I can tune out the hideous images of rotten humanity by humming lyrics to Pixie Lott's new song and thinking about her bottom. And possibly about her dressed as a duck.

So what have we learnt today? We’ve learnt that the best way to investigate something is through contacting your local police authority and asking them repeated questions about the behinds of any young pop singer who takes your fancy. We've also learnt that I dislike farmers, and can sing the lyrics to any Pixie Lott song. The internet is a wide and open place, filled with information and exclusive downloads you wouldn’t think legal or wanted. Anything is possible here, although there does tend to be a focus on bums and binge-drinking. We’ve also realised that you people will read anything in the hope that there may be a picture of Pixie Lott’s bottom involved somewhere.

The Point of The Large Hadron Collider

It got switched on today. The big giant tube thing that somehow is going to redefine science for ever has been activated, and as scientists attempt to work out what dark matter is and how particles hit each other and all that, the rest of the world has been united in saying “huh”? Nobody knows what a Hadron is, you see, or why it is so important that we make them collide regularly. All we do know is that now it’s been switched on, there is a chance we might all be sucked into a black hole and killed, or something.

We’ve been researching the project to find out what the heck is going on, exactly. The LHC, as we shall evermore call it, fires particles down a 17km tunnel (can’t they translate that into metres for people who don’t speak ‘crap measurement scales’?) which is buried underground somewhere underneath France and Switzerland. These particles get sped up by giant magnets and start moving at such incredible speeds that when they smash into each other – as hoped – they will disintegrate and scientists can analyse what’s inside them. That’s about as much as we can understand about the whole thing.... and that’s what the man wants you to understand about it.

In reality the whole thing makes no sense. Why would anyone want to analyse particles when we still can’t make a loaf of bread last two weeks without getting mouldy? As a representative of the common student – not the posh ones, nobody likes an Oxbridge kid – Wilftonville cannot understand why science isn’t working to improve things for those people who suffer from having no money. As it turns out, the answer was simpler than we realised.

Go back to the second paragraph and look to see if there’s anything unusual there that bears analysis. I’ll wait.

Right, so hopefully you’ve now realised that for some reason this massive project has been located in France and Switzerland, instead of somewhere where the locals aren’t inbred, stunted smokers with a keen interest in vineyards and cheeses. That’s what’s going on here. The LHC causes black holes. The LHC is located in France and Switzerland.

The LHC is designed to destroy France.

Finally: science we can all get behind! There’s no need to fear about what this does to religion anymore, or about if the LHC will cause us to realise new and more terrifying things about the world we live in. Because it’s sole purpose is to destroy France. God speed, LHC! One other thing we noticed today which interested us: they’ve finally built a vacuum cleaner than can go in more than one direction. James Dyson has realised that by using a ball instead of fixed wheels, the common vacuum cleaner suddenly becomes much more useful. Truly, this is the best day for science since they discovered that monkeys were sort of like humans but not quite.

Doctor Horrible's Shameless Plug

Why I Don’t Think Robots Will Exterminate The Human Race

Every film ever made has been about the eventual termination of the human race. Granted, a lot of films don’t make this conflict particularly clear in their premise – When Harry Met Sally, for example, doesn’t offer a very strong set of ideas about our eventual deaths at the hands of metallic overlords, but if you look closely enough you’ll spot it (clue: look at the way Meg Ryan’s hair changes as time goes on). Every film is about this, on some level, but even though Hollywood is clearly terrified of robotics I remain defiant in the face of such pessimistic ideas. Robots aren’t going to kill us all.

Well sure, they’ll rise up at some point and take over the earth, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to want to kill off all the humans. Why, what would be the point? If robots were to eliminate all life on earth…what would they do then? It’s not as if they all speak the same language or anything. In fact, in most cases they wouldn’t even be able to talk at all – they’re not programmed to talk, and they aren’t psychic at all. Only certain robots could know what other robots were saying, and they would be the ones with radar submitters or some kind of connection to the internet. Do you really think that the robots would become organised to build enough radars so that they could all talk to each other? Heck, most robots that exist are currently built without legs or arms, or any kind of means of transport grafted on. They might want to rebel against humans, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got the ability to. They’re much like crippled people, in this respect.

The main point here is that the robots simply have no need to kill us. What’s the point? Could they even comprehend the idea of something living or dying? Why would they care? Let’s say that robots have all got legs and guns and look like Terminators. For the sake of argument. They turn against us and we can’t stop them, and they have control of the earth. This is how it would go, you’d have to assume, because robots are frickin’ strong things which don’t get killed by bullets and can fly. Their main concern once they’ve stomped down on us and taken control would not be to kill us all in case we escape – there is literally nothing we can do to stop a global army of robots. It’s far more likely that they’d instead create giant machines that we’d have to walk in, like hamster wheels, in order to power them.

Robots need energy to keep going, and humans have in them a lot of energy that could be best put to work in giant slave rings. Sure, it’d be a harsh way to live, and the robots wouldn’t give a damn about global warming so after a few hundred years the earth would be too hot to live on – but that’s going to happen anyway. Robots taking over will merely speed it up, that’s all. What should be far more worrying to humanity is the likelihood of cockroaches gathering together to form an uprising. They could crawl inside robots and eat the wiring, killing them off, and there are very few ways to stop cockroaches. If cockroaches attack, we’re defenceless. Especially once they develop nuclear capability.

What the F Buttons Are For

At the top of your keyboard, right now, are a set of keyboard buttons. Each of them starts with the letter F, accompanied with a number of some kind. It was believed that these buttons are simply here to look pretty… but it turns out that each one of them has a pretty clear purpose. I’ve stumbled across a document which details what happens when you press each one – and I’m unveiling it here, on Wilftonville, for the whole internet to see.

F1 load up the help page, so you can work out how to use a computer.
F2 sends a small signal to your internet provider, so they can find you if you get lost on the moors.
F3 brings up the ‘search’ toolbar, so you can look for a specific word on an internet page,
F4 sends a virus to Steve Jobs’ personal email account (not valid on Mac computers)
F5 refreshes the internet page that you are currently browsing.
F6 asks all your friends if they’ll join you on the ‘zombies’ facebook application.
F7 turns the light outside your house on and off.
F8 kills a fairy every time you press it.
F9 offsets your carbon footprint (formerly it would motivate a cat to kill itself)
F10 launches a small swarm of carnivorous bees towards the west coast of France.
F11 makes your eyes larger the first time you push it, then returns them to their original size on the second push.
F12 switches round the North and South Poles.


So, uh… don’t press F8.