The Ant's Pants

If you're on Facebook, you might have encountered what I guess might be known as the Disappearing Friend Syndrome, or DFS. This occurs when you suddenly realize, whilst reading everyone else's status updates or news feeds, that you haven't seen anything online from good old Ursula lately.

What to do? Do you check your friends list to see if she's not on there anymore? If you do, that only tells you that she's off your list. You then have to enter Ursula Whatchamacallit to see if she's even ON Facebook any longer. If she is, and she's not on your list, and you did not remove her from your list, well, welcome to Dumpville: Population, YOU. As Homer Simpson once said.

If you check and Ursula is NOT on Facebook anymore, then you can at least say, "Maybe she just quit Facebook, and not just me." This brief moment of relief is then tempered by apprehension. What if Ursula was run over by a trolley? Forced to move into reduced circumstances following a scandalous unsanctified congress with a traveling dry-goods salesman from Pittsburgh? Captured by left-wing insurgents from Paraguay? (thanks, Police Squad!) Died of intellectual thirst at a Tea Party?

It's really better not to have these thoughts. Make new friends, and keep the old. One is silver and the other, gold. I think Edgar A. Guest came up with that one.

And while we're scratching around looking for things, what the heck happened to all those "My Top 5 Times Tom Cruise Jumped Up On Something" polls that were all the rage in the summertime? How about those crazy gifts - virtual Berger's Cookies, handcuffs, I <3 NJ t-shirts and hands-free back massages were the ant's pants there for a while, and now you don't see them any more.