Oh, you know. You see them all the time and they irritate the hell out of me. There are plenty of ‘inspirational’ pictures that are full of platitudes and cliche and generally enough corn to feed a small African village for a month. I deal with those – and those sickening pictures with sleeping babies lying on top of puppies. I deal with those on a weekly basis on one of my other blogs, Glurgewatch, and I am always open for more at the usual address.

But there are others. There are trends, and I’m not just talking about the stuff that George Takei posts (most of which, I admit, is pretty funny.) There’s stuff you see a lot, certainly in this country. Fads come and go – Grumpy Cat seems to be this week’s phenomena – but some seem to have been floating around for years. You’re all aware of them, of course, so I won’t elaborate too much except to note that we may divide them into four kinds:

1) Exhibitionist pictures of babies afflicted with cleft palate / Downs / whatever, ostensibly to point out that “all children are beautiful”, but really this is just setting up another kind of freak show

2) ‘Comedy’ pictures of the elderly celebrating individuality and a person’s right to be unique, which are then shared en masse by three million Facebook users

3) Batman slapping Robin

4) Gene Wilder looking incredulous.

It’s that first one that bothers me the most, I think, because it’s finger-pointing masquerading as compassion. These people really ought to watch The Elephant Man.

Pastiches of the Gene Wilder one have been done to death, so I left that alone, but others are represented below. I may be about to breach the standards of personal taste with one of these, but I think you can see my point.

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Any suggestions, please tell me. I can make more.