...Wins The Internet!

To be honest, I don’t really feel confident in talking about Valentine’s Day. When I was single, I pretended not to care, and then was properly steam-coming-out-of-my-ears furious when no-one sent me a card. Of course, I didn’t send any myself - I will not pander to the demands of Hallmark, Disney, or even Adobe. Instead I shall drink this entire bottle of red wine and watch Lost In Translation again. Oh yes I will. I’ll just have to wipe away the tears myself (not a euphemism).

Of course, since I entered a stable relationship, things have changed. I still don’t send cards - he’s lucky enough to have THIS jelly - but at least I can now observe things with a more critical eye.

Because no matter what you say, Valentine’s Day DOES matter. It DOES matter that someone loves you. It DOES matter that you didn’t send any cards. You are keeping those proud, proud people at Hallmark in a job. That said, I’m still going to watch Lost In Translation with a bottle of red wine, but at least I get someone to wipe away the tears after it has finished (sounds like a euphemism, but it’s not).

 Us Danes regularly top surveys as the happiest knitwear-wearing people in the the world. Even our gritty thrillers have a low body count. Take the country’s most popular recent export The Killing, which has its body count right there in the name and still managed to stretch the story into 20 episodes by turning The Killing into A Red Herring Smorgasbord (No that was not you treading on a Lego piece - painful puns are painful). Denmark, incidentally, also figures regularly in lists of countries with high suicide rates. So whoever answers these surveys (seriously I have never been approached) is not pining for the fjords and is therefore by default quite content. It’s true, we’re generally a very laid back tribe with a good sense of humour, which you have to have with those tax rates.

On The Twitter, there’s a hashtag “trending”* at the moment called ##Dear14yrOldSelf. The premise is simple - you tweet something that you would tell your 14 year old self. As I was huffing and puffing on the cross-trainer at my gym today, I suddenly thought to myself “#Dear14yearOldSelf Exercise more before you leave school”. Well, that’s not quite right - if you try to imagine yourself saying a hashtag, you go a bit cross-eyed and it comes out a bit wrong, like you’re sending a telegram. More precisely, I thought - “this surely would have been easier if I’d spent more time actually running, rather than mashing the keys on “Daley Thompson’s Decathlon”.

Here at ...WTI!!! we are great fans of people doing really stupid stuff and filming it for our entertainment. Because together with surprised kittens, Darwin nominees are one of the other great meme pillars that supports YouTube. Particular recipients of our undying admiration are those true innovators, followers of the Dirty Sanchez school of science, who will not only perform a particularly harebrained experiment but do it bigger and better. Why stick a finger up to evolution when you can give it a wedgie? Take the cinnamon challenge, a meme that has been doing the rounds in halls/dorms for a few years now. The premise is simple - take a teaspoon of cinnamon and try to swallow it within 60 seconds without any water. Watch the hilarity unfold as the victim’s throat goes into full-on WTF mode.

Sundays are the days of quality photo-journalism, and in the proud tradition of that, (did you know the venerable Sunday Times Magazine is 50 this year) we present “The Sunday Supplement”, images that you might have missed from The Internet.

Picture the scene: you're hungover. You're needing a fry-up, tea (the UK) or coffee (the US) mainlined, and a slanket. It could be worse though, you could be Mary.

Here at ...WTI!!! Towers*, we’ve carefully assessed each and every single-serving internet meme image on the whole of The Internet to bring you a carefully curated selection of the best. Why? Because we love you a little bit. No, a little bit more than that. No, not that much, don’t be rude. Yes, that much.

Like every quality magazine, or Heat, we’ve come up with a unique scoring system for these images. We call it the “Squee” Factor. Each image is carefully assesed for ROFLs, AWWW!s and ZOMG!s. Gareth then fictionally puts this into his giant imaginary spreadsheet, which will probably have a punning acronym name when we can think of one, resulting in a score out of ten. This will be your “Squee” Factor. AND THEY SAY THAT UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE CAN’T BE USEFUL MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. You’re welcome.

*Don’t you just hate it when magazine do that? Hate. HATE.

The image: Here’s Heidi The Cross-eyed Possum, so named because she is a possum. 

Why we should care: check her out! She’s cross-eyed!

Suggestions for deployment: if one of your mates makes a non-sequiter Facebook comment, why not respond with this? It’s the pictoral equivalent of “o_O”!

“Squee” factor: it’s good, but there’s something a bit creepy about it too. So 6/10

The image: a mournful monkey from the Sony World Photography Awards

Why should we care: he looks so...I dunno...sorry...I’m feeling a bit...not myself today...

Suggestions for deployment: this is pretty much the embodiment of “*sadface*”, so we’d suggest as a Twitter reply to upsetting news, such as cancellation of a BBC Three show, or a death on Downton Abbey.

Sometimes The Onion writes itself, so kudos to Janet Howell for her awesomely stupid/clever stapling onto a "look at the ultrasound of the baby before you terminate it" bill demanding that men who want viagra need a basic health check including a digital rectal exam.

Digital you say? That's not a camera. And even if it was, that would be one photo you didn't want on Photostream. Try explaining why that just popped up while your AppleTV was playing some bland middle-of-the-road country.

When it comes to Winning The Internet, YouTube is the anabolic steroid to the clip’s doped up cyclist. In this case, YouTube assists the Winner of The Internet for the fourth day in a row.

“April is the cruelest month”, poeticised cat-lover T.S. Elliott in “The Waste Land”. For music fans, the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party award for “Cruelest Month in Music” goes to January - witness the fact that “for real” lifeless toilet-brush headed grinning pop muppet Ed Sheeran has reached number one with sales of two copies.

The best internet videos play chicken with extreme narcissism only veering away at the very last moment. With that in mind, I present you with one of classic, "I've multi-tracked myself into the video multiple times because ONE OF ME IS NOT ENOUGH" genre.

The Muppets! Everyone love The Muppets! Apparently. Not me. What is it with the Muppets? There’s a pig! And it fancies the frog! What’s up with that?

I like cute pictures of animals as much as the next internet user, but I also like food. Both are essential to survival in daily life.

For literally years I've been unfairly forced to choose between one: Cuteness or Sustenance. Kind of like Daddy or Chips, it's an unfair choice to have to make. Why can't you have both? I hated a world that made me make that choice.

Finally I am saved.

foodonmydog.tumblr.com

As Grace Dent put it on Twitter, “the strongest reason to have kids I’ve ever seen”. In no way is this not fantastically amazing.