The nats have really started something here, when they decided to enter the 21st century and open a Facebook account. (I’ll bet Mark Zuckerberg was over the moon... or not). Anyway, their action started me thinking; if such a staid and traditional organisation as our governing party can embrace social media, why not other similarly unlikely people and organisations... both living and dead?
Photos: That’s me, centre, enjoying a joke with my best mates, after a hard morning spent invading Poland
For example... William Shakespeare:
Name: ‘Will Shakesper’.
Born: Stratford on Avon 1564.
Profile photo: Me in the title role of my new hit show, Carry on Tony and Cleo. (Eat your heart out Liz Taylor). Now playing to packed groundlings at the Bankside Rose. Booking into 1610.
Occupation: Dramatist, poet and random fornicator.
Friends: Ben (the pen) Johnson, Annie Hathaway, Dicky Burbage and the rest of the guys in The Kings’ Men theatre group. Oh yes and I’m also president of the Earl of Southampton’s fan club.
Likes: The occasional bit of hell-raising with my old mate Chris Marlowe, my very best bed, and I’m also founder member and patron of the Stratford and district Bald is Beautiful society.
Then again, if Facebook existed 70 years ago, I wonder what Germany’s wartime leader’s entry would look like:
Name: Adolf Hitler – née Schikelgruber.
Born: Austria 1899.
Profile photo: Me at four years nine months. Note the cow-lick hairstyle and the embryo Chaplin moustache.
Occupation: Fuhrer (ie: Understudy to Norbert Jowell)
Friends: Norbert of course, Benny Mussolini, Joe Goebels, Manny Goering, Harry Himler... and literally millions of anonymous shaven-headed adorers.
Likes: World domination and strutting about in an ill-fitting uniform with my right arm in the air (well if your uniform didn’t fit properly you’d also have one hand stuck in the air too). Screaming (rationally) on camera to assembled multitudes.
Photos: That’s me, centre, enjoying a joke with my best mates, after a hard morning spent invading Poland.
And why not a page for a whole country:
Facebook page for The People’s Democratic Paradise of North Korea:
Born: Out of the ashes of decadent western capitalism in 1948.
Saviour: His Righteousness Daddy Kim Il Sung.
Profile photo: About 20,000 happy, grateful citizens of the Utopian People’s Paradise of North Korea, giving a traditional North Korean two-fingered salute to a portrait of their great and dear leader, to thank him for ensuring that none of them had anything to eat for the past two decades.
Friends: Not many. Tolerated by China and a few other minor totalitarian states. Plus of course other members of the ruling Kim family including Kim Il Sung (deceased), Kim Jong Il (deceased also), Kim Pong Poo, Kim Kong, Kim Jong Un and Kim Bass Inger.
Likes: Far easier to list dislikes – and these include anywhere which is not North Korea – and anyone who is not a member of the North Korean ruling elite... past and present.
Photos: Dozens of pics of happy, smiling peasants harvesting dust and mud in verdant and lush-looking countryside. Also lots of pics of expressionless lines of troops marching through Pyongyang in a ‘show of strength’. Plus a few embarrassing pics of N. Korea’s much heralded space probe that did a belly flop into the sea, after a perfect launch (but we don’t mention the belly flop).
Fave foods: ie: National North Korean dishes: Mud pasties, rodent en croute, fingernail fricassee, condemned felon in a basket.
National motto: “It’s good to fast”.
And finally... the Taliban:
Born: Out of the Mujahaddin, formed to fight a guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan 1979-1989.
Profile photo: My cousin Ahmed, who needs to get his teeth fixed, grinning at the camera while beheading a local unsympathetic village elder.
Education: Various itinerant jihadis and a jaundiced take on the Koran.
Friends: A select few from the loony fringes of Islamic fundamentalism, including Al-Qaeda, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Abdul Qatada etc...
Likes: Anyone who actively supports global jihad – including all those listed above.
Status: Fun-loving jihadis intent on world domination and keeping women in their place ie the kitchen and the bedroom.
Lives: Some of the time furtively in “Mon Repos” cave on the Afghan/Pakistan border – and the rest of the time in considerable luxury in a villa inside Pakistan.
Photos: Here’s a lovely one of a group of us making rude signs to the camera... which is taken by a US unmanned drone from 30,000 feet up.