Not dead yet

 I suppose there's some sort of whack duality at work when I say I despise social media with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, but also spend a disturbing amount of time cruising  the Majik Intertoobz Emporium in search of even more social media.

"That's not duality, that's hypocrisy," someone just said.

Yeah, well. How 'bout I forward you this TikTok of Donald Trump playing hockey naked? That'll learn ya to crack wise.

Anyway, there I was scrolling through my Facebutt wall the other day, and, holy gee, Gene Keady DIED? And Tony Dungy, too?

Uh ... no.

Actually, they're both still alive, but ha-ha, tee-hee, some sick twists thought it would be hilarious to put up virtually identical posts about Keady and Dungy dying enroute to hospice care. This, mind you, was a week or so after some other sick twists put up the same exact post about Lou Holtz and Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger, star of book tours and the movie "Rudy."

"Watch us mess with those Notre Dame (bleeps)!", you can imagine the sick twists saying as they created the latter two posts.

'Cause, see, Holtz and Rudy are not dead yet, either, to quote Monty Python. Or at least they weren't as of this morning.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know what Facebutt (legit, non-mocking handle: Facebook) is talking about when it occasionally tells me I've violated its "community standards." As far as I can tell, Facebutt doesn't have any community standards. It just dings you when you've crossed some mystical algorithmic line or other -- which no one can identify, either, because no one knows who exactly Algo Rithm is, and why the miserable son-of-a-biscuit seems to have no discernible sense of humor.

Point is, how can telling people someone's dead when they're not dead NOT be a massive violation of "community standards"? And why do I think the folks who post this stuff are the Intertoobz equivalent of the drunken redneck whose last words are always "Hey, ya'll! Watch this!"? 

Then they try to jump the General Lee over Farmer Bob's hog barn or some such thing.

These fake-death clowns aren't attempting anything as catastrophically spectacular, but the aim is generally the same. Because it's the Interbooz, see, people actually get sucked in by this cruel hoax-ery. This is true even when they're posted on fan sites with names like Purdue Pete And His Big-A** Hammer and Jesus Saves But Rockne Gets The Rebound.

(OK. So there are no fan sites with those names. But there is a fan site named Black & Gold Hoops Community, which recycled the Gene-Keady-died-on-his-way-to-hospice meme. Doomscrollers beware.)

The rule of thumb here, of course, is don't believe anything you see on the Majik Intertoobz Emporium until you can verify it via a legitimate news source. (Of which there are fewer and fewer these days, thanks to billionaires buying up American media companies and Sovietizing them into Trump State Media. Ah, the good old days of Tass and Pravda, we remember them well!).

But enough about that. Just remember one thing: The next time someone tells you Gene Keady or Tony Dungy or the Great and Terrible Oz has died, consider the source.

Unless, of course, the source is Abe Lincoln. He did tell us never to believe anything you see on the internet, remember.

Saw that on the internet.