THE LAUGHING GOAT

Stop with the crazy smileys now, please.

It made some vague sense when people were adding a colon and bracket :) to their e-mails. That was cute. Kind of irritating and pointless, but - okay - cute.

But somebody came along and started making it official. When someone types :) they can actually draw a smiley icon in its place now. It's some automatic, "Microsoft attacks" thing. You see it all the time on message boards and instant messenger.

But they couldn't leave it at that, could they? No, then they decided to go a little further.

Let's have the red faced angry guy. Grrr! I'm angry. I'm so angry all the blood has rushed to my head. Can you see? Can you see how angry this has made me? Look - red! Very. Angry. Angry as Elmo from Sesame Street, that's how freakin' red my face has become.

And what is with the animated smileys? The thumbs up. The rolling eyes. Here's some chap holding his breath for a while before he starts laughing at you. He knew it would be funny, so he prepared the animation for when he got the joke.

Look, this guy's spinning his head. His head is literally rolling back and forth at the bottom of the paragraph. I don't even think that is an emotion. If your head starts rolling back and forth across the floor, you don't need a message board - what you need is Accident and Emergency.

What say we all back away now. Let's just leave the smiling to the trained, professional harlequins, okay?