X-mas Greetings - Pass this on...

The world, apparently, is a better place since the Internet was conceived. You can now access your email, invest money into a fraudulent hedge fund, buy a useless USB cup warmer and sell your old football stickers at any time of the day or night from your laptop. You can look up the winner of the 1972 World Darts Championship, learn the fate of the last fishing trawler to be lost in the Bermuda Triangle or find out who had an international hit single with 'Hold Me Now' in 1983 (It was Thompson Twins) - all surreptitiously from your mobile phone under the table at the Sunday Evening Pub Quiz. There are millions upon millions of educational sites and the internet doesn’t sleep, drink cups of tea, suffer from stress, demand pay increases or take industrial action because of longer working hours, so teachers could soon be on their way out.

So, what could possibly be wrong with such a wondrous invention? One word. Christmas.

That’s right, as if the festive holiday hadn’t become commercialised enough, we now have 'E-Cards'. The polo neck wearing clean air yoghurt knitting mob have said "Enough, no more trees will be cut down in order for me to write Christmas Cards and letters to my loved ones, no longer will our leafy brethren suffer at the hands of a worn out tradition! Christmas has become too commercialised and impersonal anyway!" They drew together as a collective consciousness and came up with a way to blanket spam their entire contacts list with tacky, obnoxious festive greetings cards. I am receiving up to 3 or 4 a day, and it seems in their haste to save a tree, the only made 3 versions of said card, Jolly Santa, Frolicking Reindeer and Sparkling Christmas Tree. You know the ones I mean. They say 'Xmas' instead of Christmas. They utilise a similar technology to those musical birthday cards that the clean air mob haven’t gotten the mitts on yet, to belt out a horribly scratchy 'We wish you a merry Christmas' in the time honoured tradition.

Yet, as bad as they are, its what they herald that is the real crime this Christmas. You know that once you receive that first E-Xmas Card that you are almost certainly about to receive the Christmas period chain letters.

I am sure that like me, you will no doubt have received several of those chain letter emails this year. They fall into 2 categories, the 'money scam' or the 'quick pass this on'. Either a rich old man in Botswana died and his lawyer, unable to locate any next of kin, has selected your good self to act as a broker in order to transfer funds, which you will be able to keep 20% of. Or a poor little boy in eastern Mongolia who was born with 5 extra lips and feet instead of ears needs to have corrective surgery in order to stop the people of his village sacrificing all their animals to him in the hope that he can make the rains come back. Then there’s the 'quick pass it on' style. They are perhaps the most annoying. It will be a series of pictures of various baby animals, all of which would look far more appetising on a plate with some chips and gravy, followed by a message saying something like, 'If you pass this on to 10 people you will get a surprise'. The surprise is that the next time you email these 10 people to see if anyone wants a drink, you find that you are on their ignore list because they were sick of receiving that bleedin' spam off of you. Or it's the other way around, 'If you don't send on this chain letter that was started by Winston Churchill in 1945 in celebration of the end of the war, but was actually carried in secret throughout the war by children who were members of the French Resistance that were captured and sent to POW camps where they had to keep the letter in their arse for 5 years before being rescued and presented to old Churchill, then you will be murdered in your sleep by the ghost of these children...'

There is always some berk who compiles a list of these and sends them out to everyone saying - "Remember these funny ones..." Like you weren’t annoyed the first time they went around. The one that gets me every year is the one that goes, "A recent scientific study found that men with small penises are highly likely to have read the whole of the above with their hand on the mouse...To late to take it off now" It just got you didn’t it?

The internet was created by the American Military as a way of connecting all their bases. It has evolved in something much bigger. I don't know which I would prefer, an entity that would allow every Nuke in the Americans' ballistic cupboard to be synchronised and fired at Russia in one swoop, or something that facilitates the sending of E-Cards.