Hold Still, Windmill

On our Facebook pages, there is a small section labeled "Trending," which features topics that lots of people have either searched for or clicked on when they appeared on a news feed.

Now, I should be clear. When I say not a darn thing in that section holds the slightest interest for me, I am only offering an approximation. Since the section rolled out however long ago, the number of times I have clicked on one of its items is in fact a non-zero integer. But it is not a large one.

Most of the time I click the little "X" next to it and select from the different choices offered to me as a reason I don't want to see whatever the item is. The only two I remember are "I don't care about this" and "I want to see something else." I use the former far more often, because it is accurate. When something crops up that I do care about -- a death, some kind of disaster, or another tragedy, I will use the latter. My goal is to zero out the trending topics section as something of a hint to the Facebook people that I think the trending section is stupid.

I've yet to succeed, and Facebook occasionally taunts me. Several minutes ago, it tried to tell me that among the topics trending among site users was a signal outage experienced by Direct TV customers. Surely we are approaching the end, I say to myself. Surely there can't be that many trending topics things on the internet that are less consequential!

I was, of course, wrong. A new list, full of celebrity "news" and international cricket match scores, appeared at the next refresh. So it appears my keyboard Rocinante and I must try again...