MySpace Retards

I’m sorry. There’s just no other way to express it.

I don’t use myspace much. My kids do, so I only use it to keep an eye on my young’n’s, really.

My wife does sometimes as well, and she was telling me last week how everyone else has cool pictures and stuff. She and computers are not the best of friends, so I thought I’d help her out a little and a few days ago I uploaded like 600 pictures to my account for her to use. (I don’t have access to her account, obviously.) The vast majority of them are from our trip to London in August of 2006. I kind of burned out after that, so didn’t upload too many others. (You’ll have to add me as a friend if you want to see them.)

So yesterday or the day before I got a message from myspace:

Date:

Feb 4, 2008 6:50 PM

Flag as Spam or Report Abuse [ ? ]

Subject:

We had to delete one of your photos

Body:

We had to remove an image (or images) from your account because they violated our Terms of Use. Our site is for people as young as 14, so we can’t have certain kinds of pics (nude/sexually explicit, violence, material protected by copyright). Find out more about content we don’t allow here. If you continue to violate our Terms, we may be forced to remove your account.

You may feel singled out, but be assured that we delete each and every one of these images as we locate them. If you find an image which you feel is in violation of our Terms, please feel free to use the ‘report image’ link below the image.

Thanks for your understanding.

MySpace Safety & Security

Wow. Really? I notice the “reply” button is missing, and the myspace tech support account from whence it came specifically says that questions not relating to technical support will not be answered.

Of course I have to wonder what the hell picture they were talking about. I scanned and browsed, but nothing seemed to be amiss. It was hard to tell, what with 600 pictures to look through. Finally this morning, curiosity overcame laziness and I logged into Corporal Kate’s account to check the history. In a myspace account you can see friend updates, like “Dad added x number of pictures on such and so date in y photoalbum”. I start comparing the number of uploads that Kate’s account says I made with the number of pictures currently resident in each photo album.

The British Museum album is one short.

?

Further, there are almost 200 pictures in that album to look through. *sigh*

I look immediately for the little chicken-head idol with the really big pecker (seen here), figuring that if anything, that one might have offended some religious nutjob in the tech department. Nope, that’s still there.

I compare my local folder to the album, one picture at a time. Want to know what picture they found offensive? Look below the fold.

This one (as always, click to embiggen):

Here’s the sign below that piece of statuary, which is the very next photo in the album.

It reads,

“Marble sculpture showing an African acrobat on a crocodile

Roman, 1st century BC or 1st century AD

The statue may show a member of the Tentrytae tribe of Egypt, famous for diving on the backs of crocodiles in the Nile. Crocodiles were first exhibited at Rome in 58 BC and the crowd loved them. Perhaps acrobats like this one performed in the arena and then were immortalised in stone.

GR 1805.7.3.6 (BM Cat Sculpture 1768)

Townley Collection”

That’s right. A photo of a 2000 year old Roman piece of art is offensive because it depicts a naked acrobat’s butt. Oddly, they didn’t delete the picture immediately following the description photo, which is another angle of the same work. Also, they neither deleted the lolbuttcat image I made, nor images of other works of art from the museum with (*gasp*) full frontal nudity.

Retards.

All pictures on this post taken by me, at the British Museum, August 2006, and licensed under the CC license covering this blog.

P.S.  except the lolbuttcat photo.  I just ran it through cheezburgers.