Twitter Ate My Life!

So, yeah, I disappeared again. I have a good excuse this time...sort of...well...not really, but I do have an excuse. twitter. No, I didn't forget my English lessons, twitter does not get a capital T. How does one explain twitter? Imagine a chat room that never closes, and has dozens of people in it, but you can only post in 140 character increments. A few weeks ago one of the Simply Syndicated forum members, and I cannot for the life of me remember who, invited me to join twitter. This is the same way I joined MySpace and Facebook, and the several other now-forgotten social networking sites. I never seek these things out, someone invites me to something I've never heard of, and out of courtesy I sign up, and wait for it to fall out of fashion so I can delete it. But twitter is the spawn of Satan, or the breath of the angels, or digital crack, or something. At first I couldn't imagine what I'd do with a twitter account. What did I have to say all day in little bursts. Well, as the list of people following me grew, and the list of people I was following grew slightly less quickly, I discovered just what a time-suck twitter is. Some people 'tweet' rather pedestrian things, 'I just had pancakes for breakfast', while others share a little too much, 'sugar puffs make your wee smell', but mostly it's like an ongoing conversation that you may take part in, but there is no obligation to. And unlike a chat room, everything tweeted gets saved, so most twitter users have pages of tweets to read when they...ok, I get out of bed, or get home from work, or pretty much any activity that keeps me from the computer for any length of time. There are also a lot of celebrities on twitter, but I found pretty quickly that following someone who has thousands of followers doesn't give you any better access to them than mailing a fan letter does. Your attempt to contact them is as lost in the sea of tweets as if you were shouting at them from across a crowded mall. Now the only celeb on my list is George Takei, and he hasn't said anything in a couple of weeks.

The news is unrelentingly boring lately. This whole economic crisis is massively uninteresting, especially when you realize that none of the people in charge seem to have a clue what needs to be done. Everyone has a theory on how to pull us out of recession, and everyone seems to think that everyone else's idea is crap. On the up side, at least NPR has stopped doing stories on how much it sucks to live in China.

Battlstar Galactica and The Sarah Connor Chronicles are continuing to kick ass, in my opinion. I fear for the latter show, though. Fox has moved it to the Friday night Time-Slot-Of-Death. I just hope that in this age of the DVR and TiVo that time slots no longer have much meaning. At the very least I hope that if the show gets canceled they get enough warning to wrap things up, and not leave us hanging.

And in my celebrity news, Dr. Laurence Krauss, author of numerous books including this one:

has agreed to let me interview him for Starbase 66. We haven't arranged a time yet, as he is extremely busy, but I'll keep you all posted. I am both excited and terrified. This will be my first 'real' celebrity interview, and I am a bit...no, make that really nervous. :-)

And that's all from chilly Florida(there's ice on my neighbor's car this morning). I'll be back soon with more irrelevant blather.

Peace,
Marius