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The not-so-amazing technicolour status update

Yesterday you may have noticed a number of your female Facebook friends posting a colour (or in some cases, animal print) as their Facebook status. If you were wondering what the hell that was all about, you're not alone.

The technicolour status updates were a misguided attempt to raise breast cancer awareness...at least according to the Facebook Forward most people received early on directing them to post their bra colour...that's right, their bra colour...as their status update. Classy, no?

The poorly written e-mail hoax masquerading as a viral marketing campaign urged the Facebookers as follows:

"Something fun is going on... Write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY women no men. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men wonder why the women have a color in their status.....LOL!"

Which brings me to the Things That Bother Me:

1. The term "raise cancer awareness", and variations thereof
I think most people are pretty aware of cancer. It's hard not to be. We learn about it in school, and L.D. had leukemia on Degrassi. We're aware. Rather, shouldn't we be raising awareness of the risks of cancer? And ways to lower them?

2. E-mail forwards

Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, if a subject line starts with the letters "FW", it goes directly in my junk mail folder. Your key fob can't unlock your car via cell phone, the word "shit" is not an acronym, no one wants to sing the Canadian National Anthem in any languages other than English or French at the Olympics (and they only play an instrumental version anyway), and I am now pretty sure that the Canadian Cancer Society prefers donations over status updates. Stop believing everything you read on the internet! Except, of course, what you read on this blog.

3. Facebook status updates with WTMI

I don't want to know the colour of your underwear, I am not a pervert, prevert, or any other kind of vert. I barely pay attention to the colour of my own. I also don't care to know what you ate for breakfast, what colour the puke/discharge is, or whether or not you're thinking about taking a trip to Walmart unless you're ironically reworking a quote from Old School.

There. I feel a lot better now, having gotten that off my chest. And no, you're still not finding out what colour it is.