If you spent any time at all last night on Twitter, there’s a good chance you ran across at least one tweet containing the hashtag, “#alicebucketlist.” The movement, if you will, was in honor of a dying teenage girl in Britain named Alice Pyne who, motivated by the film that starred Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, posted a “bucket list” of things she’d like to do before she dies. According to just about everyone on Twitter, one of the things on the list created by Pyne — who’s been diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin’s lymphoma — was to become a trending topic on the site.
Her purported cause was picked up by scores of Twitter users, including influential celebrities with millions of followers like Katy Perry, many of whom included links to Pyne’s blog where her full bucket list is published for the world to see…
And the effort worked! When I went to bed last night, #alicebucketlist was one of the top trending topics on Twitter…
HOWEVER…
Now, I really don’t want to be the guy to take a big, fat dump in everyone’s feel good pie, but nowhere on that girl’s bucket list is it mentioned that trending on Twitter is one of her dying wishes. NOWHERE.
Seriously, I must have read it 10 times just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, and it’s just not there. I skimmed through some of her blog posts and couldn’t find anything there either. I then went and dug up a couple of articles on Alice and her bucket list that were recently published in British newspapers — and there was no mention of her desire to trend on Twitter, nor was there one in a video report on Alice I found on YouTube. Am I missing something? See for yourself from the replica of the list published by The Sun…
Now, it’s touching that so many people took up what they thought was this girl’s cause, it really is, but did no one bother to click through the countless links to Alice Pyne’s blog and actually look at the bucket list? I mean, even seasoned journalists like Terry Moran were tweeting this…
What I think probably happened here, if I had to venture a guess, is that a few kindhearted souls started tweeting about Alice and her bucket list and expressed their wish to make the fulfillment of Alice’s dying wishes become a trending topic. Somewhere along the way the wish got mangled into it being one of the actual wishes on Alice’s bucket list, when in reality it was not. It just serves as further evidence, I suppose, of the hive mentality that Twitter fosters, where people just blindly retweet things the people they follow tweet without taking a few seconds to investigate them. THIS IS HOW JEFF GOLDBLUM GETS KILLED FALLING OFF OF A CLIFF IN NEW ZEALAND, PEOPLE!
What she really wants, more than anything else on her bucket list, is for people to sign up to be bone marrow donors. She writes:
I’m excited about the things I am going to be doing, but the biggest thing has to be all the people who are joining bone marrow donation schemes because of me. I read on someones post that it is really painful. Well, mostly bone marrow is taken as cells via a needle and I have had it done. I was 13 when I had my first transplant and because they used my own cells, I had to have them taken out (they call it harvested) and then stored and put back in some months later after more chemo. I’m not just saying this, but it really didn’t hurt at all. I had a tiny bruise from the needles and that was about it. I was a bit tired too but I’m always tired so that may not have been the cells.
So, I was never begging and I don’t need any money but I do love to get your messages and I hope you’ll follow my blog and keep leaving me a message. I will take a camera with me wherever I go and I’ll post photos of everything I do. In return, you can keep asking everyone you bump into to join the bone marrow donation schemes in your country.
Finally, I hope that all of the wishes Alice Pyne has on her list come true and wish her all the love, happiness and laughter in the world. To that end, here are a couple of gifs that never fail to make me happy whenever I see them.
And oh, sorry Tyler…