It’s rapidly becoming one of the banes of our modern existence I think.  It’s bad enough that it’s so easy to be misunderstood on instant messaging mediums due to the lack of tonal inflection etc, but now you find yourself dealing with embarrassing faux pas stemming from using poorly shortcutted (that’s probably not a real word but it’ll do! 😉 emoticons.

I was trying to wrap a conversation just now with a nice polite ‘anyway it’s nice to catch up …. I’m off to bed’ .  And instead I ended the conversation with ‘anyway it’s nice to catch up …. I’m off to   

And there have been many other similarly embarrassing incidents due to simple typos and strange emoticon allocation.  Wouldn’t care so much, except it was thrown at the one person on my contact list who wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment at all  :S

It’s happened to me before….. little emoticons of people bonking thrown up in the middle of a conversation with a guy I was just getting to know.  One of some crazy pot smoking bear thrown up when I was suggesting getting together with someone for a coffee.  Sigh…. maybe I should just learn to type more carefully…. or get in the habit of actually proof reading what I’ve typed before hitting the enter button… or even go through and delete the offensive emoticons… or switch to a boring IM client that doesn’t have emoticons at all!!!     Or maybe I should just shut the hell up and enjoy a little absurdity every now and then….  🙂

Charles Tombe is refusing to comment on the affair

Sudan’s famous goat ‘wife’ dies
The best-known goat in Sudan has died months after being “married” to a man in the South Sudan capital, Juba, the BBC has learned.

Local elders ordered a man found having sex with the goat, later called Rose, to “marry” her last February.  “The idea was to publicly embarrass the man,” says Tom Rhodes, editor of the Juba Post, which first ran the story.  The BBC’s story of the “wedding” caught the public imagination and became one of the most read internet stories.  Rose, black and white, is believed to have died after choking on a plastic bag she swallowed as she was eating scraps on the streets of Juba.

‘Sense of humour’
After the marriage, Rose had a male kid – but “not a human one” – Mr Rhodes said, hastily.
The “husband”, Charles Tombe, said he was drunk at the time but has since refused to comment on the issue. The kid is owned by Mr Tombe.  More than a year after the BBC story was first published, it is still picked up by various web forums and being emailed across the world. Recently it got more than 100,000 page views for five successive days.