I don’t have many friends.

I am a believer in quality not quantity and those people I call friends are the ones who would drop everything to help if I were in trouble.  Equally I would be just as quick to run to their aid.

I do however have a much larger circle of what I would call “good acquaintances” where I am on first name terms and can chat for hours, but I probably wouldn’t want to share a canal narrowboat with them for a few weeks.

Outside that there is the very large group who I am on nodding terms with, which includes the entire village and a lot more besides.

And then there is Farcebook “friends”.

I very rarely visit Farcebook as I find it somewhat irritating.  Apart from anything else, it is the one area of the Interweb that I have difficulty navigating or getting to work as I want it.  I see however that somehow I have managed to accumulate 123 “friends” there.  Now some of these are actual friends, some are family and some I haven’t a fucking clue who they are.  I also have a list of “friend requests” from over the years numbering into the hundreds, but not being a needy sort of bloke I just leave them there.  The vast majority I have never heard of and the few familiar names that do crop up are generally people I wouldn’t want as friends anyway.

Now “researchers” in Merca have turned their attention to Farcebook and are trying to correlate “friend requests” with mortality.

What the fuck?

If you get lots of “friend requests” you are likely to live longer?  This is stretching credulity just a tad?

They do however admit –

To be clear, both scientists pointed out, this study only shows a correlation — there’s no way to tell, at the moment, what the cause may be. It could be that healthier people get stronger networks, not the other way around. There could also be another undetermined factor that happens to influence both health and social network strength.

So what they are saying is that they haven’t a fucking clue, which is fair enough.

Have they discovered yet that the majority of Farcebook users tend to use English as their main language and therefore Farcebook is a brilliant language learning aid?  Have they discovered that people who use Farcebook are generally more technically literate than those who haven’t got a computer?  Have they discovered that people who spend their entire lives boring us on Farcebook with every minute detail of what they’re up to are generally sad fuckers who need to get out more?

I shall continue to ignore it.  Every now and then Herself shares something to my Farcebook page which is about the only tie I visit it anyway.

I wonder if I can “unfriend” her?