Dave's Fiction Warehouse

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 the demand. Maybe this accounts for the proliferation of the phrases "Go figure" and "Just sayin'." If a tweeted observation seems particularly banal, just add the ironic eye-roll "go figure" and you've got the sophisticated air of one who's seen everything. "Just sayin'" works much the same way: It implies an amused exasperation with this absurd world, a touch of whimsy that is not immediately apparent in the trite thought that preceeds it. If those don't work, there are always the "LOL!" "OMG" and "S...

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 author. Block is no literary genius, but he's a master at crime fiction. He keeps you believing the story and turning the pages. That's what good fiction is all about, and it's a lot harder than he makes it look. Particularly if the protagonist is a hired killer who collects stamps, and not all of the people he kills have it coming. If you haven't checked out his Keller series, do so. Just don't expect a warm and fuzzy feeling to result. This is not the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency . * I mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago that I'm a fan of American Idol . I'm pretty close to demanding a retraction. I skipped last nigh...

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 now follow 13 people. I am being followed by 33, which is weird because my "updates" tend to be non sequiturs, and infrequent enough to render my ranking just short of nonexistent. I never look at my Twitter ranking, of course. I'm much too cool for that. My own guide for using Twitter is this: Don't follow anyone you haven't had dinner with. But know that following friends will make you immediately and exquisitely aware of every party to which you've not been invited. Finally, while it's easy to follow someone, it's not so simple to quit. Thanks to a dopey service called Qwitter , ...

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 head over the Zip Code system. But I still don't get Twitter . If you don't know what Twitter is, fine. Perhaps we are kindred spirits and let's just enjoy this moment. If you do, that's fine too. I come not to judge. Because really, my thinking on this is mixed. We already have the attention spans of Mediterranean fruit flies, and I'm not 100 percent sold on on anything that makes them even shorter. On the other hand, who has time, what with gas prices and the war in Iraq, to put together complete sentences? Twitter asks nothing in this regard and gives much. You riff about about what you're doing, an...