A Gift From The Heart

Twitter can be a pretty awful place but every once in a while I see something beautiful. Today it was this and it made me cry:

Does anyone have buddies buried in Arlington who they would like visited today? Since only family members are allowed in, I would be honored to pay respects on your behalf...

— Emily Domenech (@ehdomenech) May 25, 2020

Click here to see what happened next.

Mittens Gets Ratioed - Updated

The chants at last night’s rally were offensive, and I’m glad the President has disavowed them.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 18, 2019

For a brief moment I thought this was a parody of Mitt's wooden, sometimes clueless style, but it's his verified Twitter account.

To be clear, my issue with this tweet is that I don't for a moment believe that Donald was sincere in his disavowal of the chants, and I'd be willing to bet that deep in his heart Mitt doesn't believe it either. Why is he pretending he does? Is he that desperate to curry favor with Donald and his racist supporters? 

Updated on Friday morning. Laurence Tribe has similar thoughts:

Pathetic. It was as fake a disavowel as I’ve ever heard. And it was part of Trump’s lie about how he responded to the chants in the first place. @MittRomney is just another tool. Such a disappointment. https://t.co/moBNpQi16l

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) July 19, 2019

Update #2. Stuart Stevens was the Romney campaign's top strategist during Mitt's 2012 run for president. 

There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind his staff started it. you can hear it start with a bunch of loud young guys. and then the crowd at large started in. it was like the "applause" at his CIA Memorial wall speech.

— shippy (@Icky_Mettle) July 18, 2019

Do I Look Like Chewbacca?

A first: I got trolled on Twitter. It started with this:

On a scale of 1 to everything in her being, how much do you think Kate Middleton hates Meghan Markle?

— Jaclyn Swartz (@JaclynSwartz) December 25, 2017

Jaclyn seems to think that Kate resents the attention Meghan is getting. If true, I think that's unfortunate, so I responded with this: 

@1chicklette Wouldn't it be great if they could support and encourage each other? Women don't have to be enemies

— Kimberly Hanes (@WritingTheWorld) December 26, 2017

Some (unknown to me) tweet-troll person using the handle "1987kma" apparently didn't have anything better to do on Christmas Day than respond to me, saying "Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have bangs like Chewbacca?" Ha! Really, 1987kma? That's the best you can do? As "viciously unkind responses from total strangers on Twitter" go, yours is pretty lame. I look like Chewbacca? Really? 

I wanted to post the tweet from 1987kma but it's been deleted. Either 1987kma was overcome with an unfamiliar moment of holiday kindness or she's changed her mind and decided that I don't really look like Chewbacca. Either way, we all live on to Tweet another day. 

Fave Tweet Of The Day

From "Politics and Humor" (@PoliticalLaughs):  More Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died from Ebola.

Love it.

Trouble With Tweeting

What is it with airlines and tweets about the World Cup? A couple of weeks ago Delta got in trouble because they didn't know that there are no giraffes in Ghana.

Now Royal Dutch Airlines is in #twitterhell because of their tweet about Mexico's loss to the Netherlands. Read about it here.

Our Precious Tweet

Delta Airlines was the subject of some Twitter mockery yesterday, when they tweeted a congratulatory message for the U.S. soccer team after their exciting 2-1 victory over Ghana. So what's wrong with this picture?



I wouldn't have known either, off the top of my head, but apparently there are no giraffes in Ghana. (Interestingly, Delta does in fact fly to Ghana, but they don't appear to know the country very well. Or, at least, whoever manages their Twitter feed doesn't know Ghana very well.)

The part that really made me laugh, however, was when Delta tried to tweet out an apology:

What's wrong with this picture? Just one little letter - they meant to say "previous" tweet. It's all about the proofreading, people.

CNN's story (The Giraffe Gaffe) has some of the clever response tweets. 

Hearing The News

In 1981, I learned that President Reagan had been shot when the soap opera I was watching on television was interrupted by an "ABC News Special Report".

In 1986, I heard about the Challenger explosion from a co-worker in the parking lot at San Francisco airport.

In 1997, I found out about the death of Princess Diana when a friend called me very early that Sunday morning.

This evening I'm struck by the fact that although the death of Michael Jackson and the death of Walter Cronkite have almost nothing in common, in my mind the two events are connected by the way I learned they had happened: I found about both events on Twitter.

Changing The World ...

... one tweet at a time. Apparently Twitter is playing a key role in how information is coming out of Iran in the aftermath of the disputed election, so much so that the U.S. State Department has asked the site to defer a planned maintenance outage that was scheduled for this afternoon. How about that? It's easy to laugh about Twitter and be dismissive about the whole idea, starting with the silly name ("tweeting"? Really?), not to mention the notion of substantive information being squashed into messages no longer than 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Twitter gets the last laugh, because it's clearly having an impact far beyond those of you who are mesmerized by my tweets about tomatoes and my web development homework. Just one more way the world, and how we get information about what's going on in it, is changing.

Here's what cnn.com is saying about this.

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet ...

... that's certainly the question. I set up my account on Twitter a few weeks ago and I've found it to be a fun way to express myself on topics both interesting (Talk like Shakespeare Day) and otherwise (perhaps a few too many weather updates from Chicagoland.) I also enjoy reading the tweets of the various people I've signed up to follow - again, some are interesting, some are boring and some people obviously felt inspired to create their Twitter personas but have fallen out of love with actually tweeting. Whatever. So far, I'm enjoying it.

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, take a look at this article from Time.com. It's an interesting example of how this new-fangled way of communicating is changing the way we all get information. Twitter may be annoying sometimes but my guess is that it's not going away. Tweet on!

Still Twittering

Or should I say "tweeting"? Regardless, it's a fun way to keep up with what's going on in the world, or at least what's on the minds of people who tweet. And I've decided you can get a pretty good idea of what someone is interested in by looking at the accounts they're following. Anyone looking at my home page will see that I follow sites/tweeters on the subject of travel, food/cooking, current events, politics, a couple of entertainers and tout les choses français, along with a few personal friends. At present I'm not following Oprah or Ashton, I am following Maria Shriver, although she hasn't tweeted since I joined, and I was following a couple of CNN accounts until it got to be too much and I deleted them.

It's still a relatively new way to communicate, and I may get tired of it at some point, but for now I say, Tweet On!!!

Fun With Twitter

Twittering is Fun! It really is - whoever came up with the 140-character format was brilliant. As I said in my last post, you don't have to worry about being profound or earth-shattering, you just write down whatever's on your mind. If it's boring - oh well, life is boring sometimes and maybe the next tweet will be more interesting. So I'll twitter on, at least for a while, trying to find the right balance between sharing what I'm doing without drifting into TMI territory. No tweets about teeth brushing or other such things, I promise. Other than that, who knows.

Skype-ing and Facebook and Twitter, Oh My!

"Oh, My" indeed. I joined Twitter yesterday and so far I've written three "tweets". If you're interested you can check it out here: http://twitter.com/writingtheworld. With all the new ways to communicate and stay in touch, I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up. I know I'm behind on checking my Facebook page, and for a few weeks I was out of the habit of blogging, too. The unique thing about Twitter, of course, is that it's only 140 characters, which is really short and sweet - very easy to update and you don't have to worry about being profound. On the other hand, I do worry about being banal (i.e., boring.) Does anyone really want to know that I just vacuumed my carpets? Or even that it's supposed to be 73 degrees here in Chicagoland today? I have noticed that both my first two tweets and my recent blog posts seem to be a little bit obsessed with the weather. As I've said before, that's what happens at the end of a Chicago winter. We really do appreciate the first stirrings of spring.