Facebook pictures you should think twice before posting

Sometimes you're scanning through your Facebook news feed and come across a picture that either upsets you, irritates you, or just seems like an enormous waste of time. I do not like these types of pictures. They must stop.

Here are three categories of annoying Facebook pictures that I wish I didn't have to look at anymore:

1

Food

This one has been covered and covered and covered by just about every angry comic blogger that ever was alive, and yet people still do it.

YOU GUYS. STOP.

First off, I can tell you with 99.99% certainty that the picture you post doesn't look anywhere near as appetizing as the actual meal may have looked. Most of these pictures look more like a vomited-up dinner than a not-yet-consumed dinner. If you want people to get jealous and feel hungry based on how delicious your meal is (and everyone wants to do that sometimes -- lord knows I have frequently tried to make enemies based on my tasty culinary delights), USE YOUR WORDS. Describe how good it smells and how it's cooked to perfection and how the cheese has melted just so. If you just upload a picture of your weird saggy lasagna with a couple spears of limp asparagus next to it, I think "gross" and happily go back to eating my Hamburger Helper, which looks suspiciously much better than whatever supposedly gourmet crap you're eating.

Here are a few examples of what I found by googling "food instagram." Tell me if any one of these makes you even slightly hungry:

Gross.

Gross.

Terrible.

Are you kidding me?

Exceptions: If you've got a really impressive spread of food -- like a party buffet that either looks really awesome or is impressive for sheer quantity -- then by all means, document that shit. If you've baked some sort of cake or equivalently attractive confection and you think you did a particularly good job decorating it (or maybe a notably poor job), go ahead and document it. Or if you've made the food into something hilarious or awesome (like if you arranged your mashed potatoes into a peenor), then please, please let me see.

Ha!

2

Your kids with food smeared all over their faces

I will tread as carefully as I can on this one, because it seems like just about every mother does this at some point or another. And if you have, don't worry: I still like you, and hopefully after this section, you will still like me too. If I accomplish nothing else with this but to prevent MYSELF from ever uploading these kinds of pictures in the future, then I will consider this a success.

Dear Moms: after changing thousands of diapers and seeing liquids you didn't know existed spew forth from your child and get crusted between the chains of your favorite necklace, you've become desensitized to gross. It happens. So please, please believe me when I say this: pictures of your kid with food smeared all over his face are DISGUSTING. They're gross. They're not funny. They turn my stomach.

I'm not even going to include an example shot, because that's how much they turn my stomach.

It's not just that spaghetti sauce caked into eyebrows is gross (but it is). It's also kind of ... pathetic and sad, I guess. Like that video of David Hasselhoff rolling around on the ground too drunk to eat a hamburger properly, there's just something pitiful about a person who isn't able to feed themselves -- no matter their age. I don't laugh at that sad old guy with a giant mustard stain on his shirt -- I pity him. And I feel the same sort of grossed-out pity when I see that your kid managed to get as much applesauce into his ear canals as into his mouth. It makes me think that your kid is stupid. I'm just being honest here, really: that is the subconscious feeling I get from seeing these pictures.

Sigh.

It also doesn't help that almost any type of food that can be smeared on a person's face resembles a bodily fluid that absolutely should NOT be near the innocent face of a child. Just think about THAT next time you're tempted to share that shot of your kid with dark brown pudding or bright red marinara sauce or, god forbid, gloppy white cream of wheat all over himself. If you think it's funny, take the picture. Send it to your mom, and maybe to a couple of other mom-friends. But don't put it on Facebook.

Exceptions: if your kid has one dollop of frosting on his nose or a single Cheerio glued to her forehead, go for it. That achieves the sort of funny that I think you were going for the whole time, but without making me throw up something that looks like the pictures in part 1.

THIS. This is cute. This does not make me sad.

3

Pictures of you doing something boring ... that are actually just pictures of your boobs

Oh, ladies-who-love-their-boobs. You are so cute. You thought you had us fooled, didn't you, with that selfie of you unloading the dishwasher? Maybe you can fool the boys on your news feed with these ones, but you're not going to get away with it while I'm around.

I'm talking about pictures that masquerade as shots of you cuddling your cat or pretending to drink whiskey straight from the bottle or doing any other number of inane things ... but you're standing in this odd way in a low cut shirt that makes it totally obvious you're just posing a cleavage shot.

I'm built like an athlete (read: if I inhale deeply, I can almost fill my A-cup), so it is physically impossible for me to do this. But that doesn't mean I didn't try to back in my younger years. And so I know all the tricks. And they make me laugh. 

Okay, I thought about this one some more, and this is actually the only one on the list that you don't have to stop doing. In fact, I kind of love it -- please continue, but come up with more and more creative ways to make the cleavage shot look accidental. 

Please, please, let's all do this now. I'll go first with a nice stuffed-bra shot (no seriously, I put on two bras and filled them with socks). Guys, you can join too. Just remember the low-cut top and lovely fake breasts:

Just doing some laundry, because obviously me sorting whites and darks is a Facebook-worthy shot.

 Oh look, someone gave me a Shakespeare book! Let me just hold it in such a way that my upper arms are forcing my boobs together and up.

Also, I tried to do duck face and it was such an abysmal failure that I replaced it with this actual duck.

Take your own "oops, are those my boobs?!" pictures and post them on my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/PatentsPatented ... or email them to me at patentspatented@gmail.com and I'll add them to this post (I can put a clown over your face if you'd prefer, or even a duck), or send them to me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/patentspatented.

YAY FUN GAME.


Oh yeah, and ... yeah, no more food pics, kay?