Twelve Pipers Piping

Roddy Piper in ‘They Live’ (1988)

Back in 2018, I celebrated the Christmas season with a satirical treatment of the Twelve Days of Christmas. The last day of Christmas is January 5th. It was on that day that I published this post at my website Instapunk Rules and on Facebook as well.

Take a minute to view the entire original post here.

Today is January 5th, as it was in that post. As it was exactly two years later in 2021, when the next day would make January 6th a date heard round the world. Which makes the coincidence of the 2019 post, if it is that, seem comically prophetic. People who have seen the movie know that Roddy Piper does finally storm the headquarters of the invading aliens to “chew bubblegum and kick ass.” And he loses, dying in the process.

End of story? Not quite. Yesterday it was Facebook’s Memories algorithm that added a further touch of irony. I was notified by FB of my 2019 post on January 4th about “Eleven Drummers Drumming.” The notification included a working link to the Instapunk Rules url where it was to be found. Hmmm, I thought, and tried to take them up on the offer to share it. Here’s a snapshot of how that went.

My original post did not black out the working url FB had 

used. I added the blackout later so I could show the exchange.

Here are the offending Drummers by the way:

Pretty unacceptable, eh?

Clearly, posting the next day’s more content-sensitive post about the last day of Christmas was out of the question.

Which highlights an interesting other fact on the timeline of recent years. My website Instapunk Rules (IR) had obviously been banned sometime after January of 2019. So had its predecessor and companion site Deerhound Diary (DD). Those two sites contain over a thousand posts between them and include many political posts FB could have banned individually as well as posts about all manner of other things. The choice of the FB censors? Ban them both totally and punish even the effort to link them as a crime against Community Standards. Which must have occurred sometime in 2019, when the nation’s liberty was going to hell as I chronicled at both IR and DD. My reference point was the year 1969, exactly 50 years prior to 2019, and I pulled no punches but made no threats, violent or otherwise. My four-part post-mortem of 1969 as a prophetic antecedent is here, but I had laid extensive groundwork for this discussion back in 2018.

I wrote in December 2018 “2019 will be a momentous year.”

Which it proved to be. Two independent proofs:

It’s been downhill for all of us since these two 2019 disasters.

Which may or may not be closer to the truth as omens than Roddy Piper’s climactic confrontation. You decide. Whatever you think, no one can doubt that FB’s left hand doesn’t know what its other left hand is doing.