Turning on the FOLLOWER button.

This, my friends, is a momentous day for my blog. I’ve turned on the FOLLOWER button. So click it already and help me over the awkward moment of having 0 Followers.

What is this FOLLOWER business? I guess it’s a bit like friending someone on Facebook. You don’t actually want to be friends with them. You are not going to rush to their bedside at the first sneeze and cough or lend them money when they are broke or offer to babysit their dogs, cats, or kids. No, none of that drippy stuff. You just want to look at their wall when you are bored, and if there are pics of them in embarrassing situations, you share them widely. It’s the same with becoming my FOLLOWER. You don’t actually have to follow me around. No, this is a unique opportunity for you to do a good deed and experience that warm, fuzzy feeling of moral superiority without actually doing much beyond pointing and clicking. Seriously, I wish there were more blogs that would allow me to click on their FOLLOW button. Here is my wish list:

THE MEDICAL SCIENCE BLOG. Useful to keep me up to date on the benefits of taking an Aspirin a day, which was good for a long time, then bad, now good again, according to some of the 10,000 pieces of advice on the net – but don’t quote me on this. The last time I checked was eight days ago. The situation may have changed since. You see how important it is to keep up to date? I wonder whether SILK ROAD has a FOLLOWER button. According to Wikipedia, that’s a “certifiable one-stop” online mart for illicit drugs with a revenue of 2 Million Dollars a month. So what’s the newest designer drug? Somebody tell me before they shut down the site!

THE CRITIC’S PAN BLOG. That’s what I need to catch up on the newest phrases to express my disgust with books, movies, and TV shows. “Shock and awe” no longer evokes shock and awe, and you don’t always find such a handy collection of terms as cited in Joel Rubinoff’s article about The Newsroom:

-monstrously conceived and incompetently executed

-manipulative and shrieky

-choking on its own sanctimony

-epochal failure

-will crash and burn with hellish spectacularity, etc. etc.

Choice words, my friends. I can’t wait to use them in my next book review. Or should I just follow the example set by Zoe Whittall who admits (Globe & Mail, 11 August): “I settled in on the couch, read the first page, put it down and e-mailed my editor to ask for a week’s extension.” And that was a positive review!

THE HEALTHY EATING BLOG. Eggs are good for you, says thedietchannel.com. Eggs are bad for you, says nursingtimes.net. I need a FOLLOW button to sort this out every morning before breakfast. And if that’s not confusing enough for you, read the Metro News: A focus group was fed regular chips and chips dyed red. Apparently the red chips made them pause and eat less. According to the researcher in charge: “They say, am I really that hungry?” But that article appeared on 23 May. So maybe it’s already stale-dated, and science has moved on to green chips. You get my drift? We need more FOLLOW buttons!