Don't Panic. It's only Facebook.

I am constantly being driven mad (but not driven away it seems) by the shit people post on Facebook.

The constant;

For crying out loud. The fact they are always so unbelievably easy tells me one thing.
Information sharing spam.

The incessant 'police' warnings making women feel unsafe going to the frickin store (that's a rather in depth rant that I'll not get into here, but it had to be mentioned).

The candy crush invites....

These;

Whatever your beliefs might be, the idea that angels or god or whatever is 'challenging' you through Facebook is absurd. I think this shit is nasty for so many reasons. In my humble opinion it is false hope giving lies. This comes from a place of love and care, but if your life is so broken, only you can fix it.

I hate all 'like'/'share'/'ignore' memes. Full stop. Especially the ones that use photos of really poorly children....grrrrrr.

I'm also annoyed by the fact that every other day there is a new 'missing person/dog' spread on Facebook. I usually google them, if I have a moment. The reason I've never shared one is because they have almost always been found. Of course I understand how useful social networking sites can be for sharing information quickly, but it's a useless tool if people become blasé about seeing these things presuming them to be bullshit. If we checked them before we shared them, it would be a far more powerful weapon.

So anyway, now this;

Now we're all terrified of six legged spiders??

Cue the back story which has made me write this today.

Yesterday my boys were playing with a spider, which by the time I caught them and recommended they put it in the bug collector so they could look at it, only had six legs. I presumed they had managed to pull in the off in the unmentionable game they were playing with it before I came to the rescue. But when I saw this on a friend's page, I began googling, fearful that they had in fact been playing with something quite dangerous.

Now I'm going to have to say it.

I didn't want to. 

I didn't want to be a bitch. 

But people, will you please, before you put something on your FB wall, will you please google it? 

Find out for yourself if it's true or not.

This is what I found, after months of being annoyed by the whole 'sudden influx of 10,000,000,000 deadly spiders in the U.K.' thing.

Google was mostly full of cheap newspaper articles about deadly spider bites, but there was also some real information about the species.

Interestingly, this spider the noble false widow, has been in the UK since it came in on some bananas in 1870. 
So no sudden influx. 
Just an increase in numbers and a movement north as our climate became warmer.

Also, it turns out it's not so deadly, since no one as actually died. Ever.

Warning, don't watch this video if your stomach turns at the crawling of a spider over a persons hand. Mine does. I held it in because my boys were watching and I'm trying to be brave.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/false-widows--it-s-probably-a-false-alarm-152131532.html

I learnt a fantastic new fact today. There are 670 species of spider in Britain (blurgh), but only 12 of these are capable of biting a human (yay!).

So, I think we should try to be more responsible about what we throw onto our timelines, and not just click it without thinking.

And let's try not stress people. 

Relax.

Even if you've seen it on Facebook, doesn't mean it's true :)