A man who finds himself living in the South should probably cultivate an interest in NASCAR. But that’s harder than it looks. Last night I caught about 25 laps of the Daytona 500. As you may have heard, rain delays had pushed it into prime time. So it was either that or “Two and a Half Men.” Having been in Daytona over the weekend, I was marginally […]
Bullet-sized morsels of WWII
My son, a student of military history, sent me this link, in which the daily events of World War II are posted to Twitter as though a remarkably omniscient observer had managed to find a smart phone and a decent service provider in 1940. The typical tweet goes like this: “Soviet bombers are attacking Finnish town of Sortavala, near Mannerheim Line- centre ablaze, at least 20 civilians […]
Trapped in the trite? Try these:
Facebook and its mildly retarded cousin Twitter have unleashed a huge demand for pithy remarks, single sentences so clever and incisive that they are instantly echoed around the globe. If one’s worth is measured by the number of followers one has, then the exponent of that worth is the number of one’s pithy messages that get re-Tweeted. Alas, the supply of cleverness has not kept pace with […]
Hits, twits and falling idols
Here’s a grab bag of items on a day when nothing in particular rises to the fore. Such days seem entirely too frequent. * Just finished reading Hit and Run, Lawrence Block’s latest in his series about the hit man J. P. Keller. These days I rarely finish a book on the same day I acquire it; when I do, I have to give props to the […]
If you don’t Tweet, you ain’t sheet
Perhaps signaling the imminent demise of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal has posted a guide for using it. The guide runs 1,200 words and does a good job of explaining why this is something you may not want to bother with. Whenever I see the phrase “social-networking tool,” my eyes glaze over. Not that I mind Twitter. I’ve been on it for a couple of months. I […]
For those about to Twitter …
I was on the Internet long before AOL, embraced e-mail in its infancy, put up a few web pages when you still had to know some basic HTML to do it. I’ve had online photo albums for years, I’m still slogging away with this dumb blog and I even flirted briefly with Facebook. So I don’t consider myself some kind of Andy Rooney luddite, still scratching my […]