I should be in traffic right now, dodging Sydneysiders escaping town with kids and campervans in tow. But I’m not, because my mother-in-laws flight from Adelaide has been cancelled.
It’s not a permanent reprieve, she’s just been shoe-horned onto a (much) later flight. But it does mean I have time to kill, so let’s talk about a kickballer and an egg.
To distinguish it from other types of kickball, this kickball is sometimes called soccer, ‘though people frown if you do.
Argentina “won the soccer” recently, so that must have been nice for Argentinian kickball fans.
But who else would care?
Lionel Messi is one of 45.81 million Argentinians.
Lionel is good at both kickball and tax fraud, but he is important to this post because he is good at something else, and is now more famous than the most famous egg.
Here’s Lionel now:
By famous I of course mean “famous” because out there in the world there’s a thing called Instagram.
People share images and videos on Instagram, and the more ‘likes’ a person gets the more famous they are EVEN if they are an absolute oxygen thief.
Which is odd isn’t it.
To put this oddness into perspective, a clever campaign to replace the most-liked Instagrammer (Kylie Jenner, above, who is not a kickballer) saw an image of a humble egg attract 57,517,339 likes.
The most “famous” egg.
But this effort to rebalance the universe has now been swept away by Lionel, who is also good at Instagram.
A picture Lionel posted has attracted almost 70 million likes — more than the population of Argentina.
I’m not persuaded.
While everybody likes eggs (and at least some people like Kylie Jenner) are there really that many kickball fans who are happy that Lionel’s team “won the soccer”?
Aren’t they the team everybody loves to hate?
I don’t know if a person can like a photo on Instagram more than once; if not, something is rotten in the united provinces of the Río de la Plata.
The only explanation for dethroning the almighty egg is either (a) people uninterested in kickball liked Lionel’s photo, or (b) people not from Argentina (perhaps Kylie Jenner fans) liked Lionel’s photo.
I smell a fraud.
Things could get messy.