The Curmudgeonly Tweeter

I have friends.  You might be surprised at that since I can be downright surly on occasion.  Maybe most occasions.  I have always wanted to be known as curmudgeonly, but curmudgeonly takes work.  Truly lazy curmudgeons are rare, so I may have to choose.

One friend writes wonderfully sophisticated stuff for Young Adults, along with a wonderfully creative creative blog she calls Harley May - because that's who she is.  She found a book she likes - follow the link and read the review - which has inspired a contest in which followers are to recreate scenes from the book.  Enclosed is Harley May's own recreation of one scene in which someone is driving a nail through a body part.  That's what we curmudgeons like to see.  Nails.  And body parts.  Especially body parts.

 

Anyway, I am telling you these things so you will know that even curmudgeons have a heart.

Harley May wants me to get on Twitter and engage in social networking. Does that sound curmudgeonly?  Damn right it doesn't.  (Curmudgeons say "damn" a lot.  It certainly makes me feel better.)  No self-respecting curmudgeon would stoop to tweeting.  Tweeting makes me irascible.

Newt 

I'm Staying Here

I met with Susie and Bill today to learn how to make my blog work for me. Susie has the advantage of being much younger than I, so she naturally understands blogs and twits better than I. Actually, I understand twits all too well; it's tweets that leave me puzzled and forlorn. Bill, on the other hand, is nearly as old as I, so understands virtually nothing about this crap. I find that endearing. It's not hard to tell who's who: see Susie's blog at http://harleymay.livejournal.com/ See Bill's at http://www.badadvicecolumn.com . Susie, of course, is also considerably better-looking. (Don't ask me why one website is linked to this post and one is not. I have no freaking idea. Neither does Bill.)

Now, in violation of the peculiar sensibilities of the on-line community, of which I am now a de facto member -- I say "de facto" so my old lawyer friends will see that I can still talk the talk -- anyway, I've probably outed Susie by mentioning her name in the same sentence as her Harley May blog address, so let's pretend I just made up the name "Susie" for this post. You with me, Bill?

I came home from our meeting fired up by my observation that webpress.com makes it much easier for readers to post comments and subscribe to its blogs than does blogspot, which is where you are reading at the moment. If you try to comment on this site, I'm afraid, you will face the Medusa that calls itself Google. Only by leaping through bewildering hoops -- much like my SSA hoops in the preceding post -- can you actually leave a complaint about the various inanities you find here. Now that I think about it, that's probably a good thing.

I set up a proto-website at webpress and immediately sank so deep in the geek-mire that I couldn't reach my beer. I am humbled. Well, I'm further humbled, I suppose, since I have been humbled so often before. In any event, you won't soon find me on webpress. In fact, I can't find the site myself. It may or may not still exist.

Once this is posted, I'm going to go sign up for a twitter thingamabob. God help us all.

Newt