Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Twitter and Twits

Bizarro is brought to you today by Gifted Equines.

I don't Twitter yet – or Tweet, or Twit – but I'm told I should. I can't remember anything else ever sweeping the globe as quickly as this thing has. A year ago, I don't know that I'd even heard of Twitter, now I can't watch five minutes of the news without someone mentioning it. As well as millions of average nobodies like you and me, celebs, polititicians, terrorists, and who-knows-who else is Tweeting. Here's a random sample from this morning:

Demi Moore..."Ashton is playing with his Hot Wheels on the living room floor again and some of my lady friends are coming over for bridge soon!"

John McCain..."Okay, I confess, I'm a young guy hired to make McCain look hip. He's sleeping in the back seat of the limo again."

Pope Benedict XVI..."Damn, these masses are long. I get hungry. Thank God I thought to stash some bratwurst and beer in my big tall hat."

Okay, I admit that last one was made up. The pope likely is Tweeting, but I doubt any of them are about bratwurst or beer. More likely, he sends out hourly reminders for people not to use contraception or to let their women get too much authority.

Speaking of which, Sarah Palin has been batting 1000 lately. Man, what a media train wreck she is. Her "Quitters Are Losers And I'm No Loser So I'm Quitting The Governorship" speech led me to create the following image. Hope you like it. If you don't recognize the reference, watch this.

17 comments:

tangobaby said...

I finally succumbed to Twitter pressure yesterday. I am not sure yet, but it might cause me to develop ADD. Beware.

Waldo said...

I am sooooo sick and tired of Twitter on many, many levels...

1) Twitter does not have a solid business plan and has not made $1 dollar in profit to date. Nor do they have a business plan to ever make a profit. They have idiot investors dumping (throwing away) money in the company and they will be obsolete in 1-2 years. (Twitter pay 2-3 cents per SMS sent for a free service - you do the math for the millions Twitters)

2) Who do I think I am to think that my life is so important that I have to have followers wanting to know what I am doing on a hourly basis.

3) Why would I want to know what anyone else is doing at that moment? Why would I care what the texture of someone's (famous or not) poop? "Grandpa's poop was an hour late but solid"

Basically my comment to the Twitters: "Sorry, Mr Rodgers was wrong, you are not that special"

sheer.nothingness said...

Yayyy! Married to the sea (the talented equines link)!

Also, I'm a sucker for noir- so yay for the comic!

Q: Who complains about twitter on their blog?
A: People who have signed up by the time you read the complaint.

ambrose said...

Wow. I didn't... How... Can that woman actually have been elected?

Chriss Pagani said...

I've been on twitter for ...I don't know, too long already. There are other artists on there so I'm supposed to be hip or something. I still don't see what it is good for, however. It's just the latest tulip craze as far as I can tell.

Speaking of which, sure you can laugh at Sarah Palin NOW, but what about when she's sworn in as the President, hmm? They said the same stuff about George W Bush and look what happened.
Never never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.

doug nicodemus said...

techno fads come and go...i still post my poetry on myspace.com/dougnicodemus...because facebook is not conducive to it nor is twitter (140 characters, really, what a joke)...but when you go there the silence is currently deafening...who knows maybe it will be retro in 6 months.

Jym said...

=v= Back in 1994, people would send World Wide Web links around in email, with a little note, "Hey, check out this 'Bambo' cartoon scanned in from a fax!" Only twelve of us had "Home Pages" then, so you could usually figure out from the link where you were going.

With Twitter, you're limited to 140 characters, so it uses some service to mangle the link into something unreadable like http://bit.ly/ZF85w, leaving you enough room to write, "Hey, check out this link." That's 15 years of progress for you.

Unknown said...

Pagani: I think it's unfair to call people who vote for someone you don't like "stupid." And honestly, I'm really sick of the hatred that rises up whenever Sarah Palin is mentioned. It's juvenile.

RSJ said...

Great cartoon and Palin poster. Yep, Princess Caribou has much in common with both Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, as well as Miss Kali-forn-yuh Carrie Prejean -- a sort of older, winkier version of both.

But "Such as" Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen SC 2007, seems a decent kid who simply left her brain in her other swimsuit that day, whereas Carrie truly is something out of a Stephen King novel -- she means what she says and I think she's using Palin's career as a format for her entry into politics and, as we discovered from Schwarzenfluffer's example, anyone can get elected in CA if they are sufficiently notable, experience, intelligence and temperament notwithstanding. (BTW, why isn't Ah-nuld being recalled now that his poll numbers have plunged below Gray Davis' when he got the hook?)

I agree with Waldo -- Twittering seems a useless flash in the pan destined to go the way of Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids (koff, koff, creak) atop the mountain of trendy detritus that is American culture these days. I've read some of these unsweet 'Tweets' -- can there be anything more boring than some self-absorbed celebrity or politician describing their breakfast or family vacation? Especially while using '2' for 'to' and '4' for 'for' -- worst, of course, being 'G8' for 'great.' Sometimes 'G8' looks like 'GB' to me in a quick read, which I take as shorthand for 'George Bush,' leaving me to ponder why some politician had a 'George Bush' time on vacation. What did he do -- invade a Middle-Eastern country?

Speaking of Junior, Pagani has an excellent point: When I first saw Dubya emerge from Texas to run for president, I thought he didn't have a snowball's chance in Sanford's Argentina Lover of succeeding -- he came off like a nervous high school kid practicing his inept debating skills.

I think Sarah "I'm a Quitter Who Never Quits" Palin's Oval Office ambitions are kaput, too, but I've been horribly wrong before.

Brandy said...

Wow, I think it's hilarious how liberals love to criticize political candidates, eight months after elections! Where's the sport in that? You guys won! Hurrah for you! Now you can stop getting on McCain's and Palin's case! Just be quiet and be happy with our current president.
I mean, I'm a conservative, and I don't criticize Obama, even though he's still in the picture! You liberals need to go find something productive to do.

Anonymous said...

Aaah, Twitter. Yes, I tweet. Rarely, but I do. Most of what I do there is watch role-play from people pretending to be characters from awesome shows/books/comics. And there's this guy who tells jokes each day without worrying about being politically correct.

So yeah. Twitter's only really good if you plan to stalk people who don't really exist.

RSJ said...

@ Brandy: I would be very happy to forget Ms. Palin completely, but she continues to stage photo-ops to keep her name in the news.

If you happened to catch the latest one wearing waders, and you know anything about fishing up north, you'd know that no sane Alaskan would go out in a boat like that wearing waders. If you fell overboard, the waders would fill with water and you'd quickly sink to the bottom and drown. BTW, just to add to the hilarity, she got a nail job right before her waders photo-op. Real fisherwomen wouldn't do that knowing their nails will be a mess after a day of fishing.

She's a laughingstock in Alaska, but she apparently doesn't care what Alaskans think of her anymore -- she obviously has bigger fish to fry in the lower 48 states.

Piraro said...

@Brandy...
Palin has done her level best to stay in the news and with that comes satire and criticism. It's not just a "liberal" thing.
Wiser Republicans are criticizing her, too, seeing what a disaster for the party she is.

Chriss Pagani said...

@Josh I agree, it's not fair to "call people who vote for someone you don't like 'stupid.'" I didn't do that, however. What I *actually* said was, "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers."

And yes, I think stupid people determine the outcome of elections. If I wanted to be nicer, I could substitute "ignorant" or "uninformed" for the word stupid. I guess it would also be more accurate.

Witness: Similar approval ratings (68-72 percent) for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. That mean that a big chunk of the American public who thought Bill Clinton was the greatest thing since sliced bread also thought that George W. Bush was a great president. And now they like Obama.

I don't care which word you pick; I think it's stupid.

RSJ said...

@Piraro: Palin's been criticized for causing her own problems by Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Reagan; uber-conservative George 'F.' Will; Kathleen Parker and other conservatives, so it isn't just a 'liberal' thing.

@Pagani: I agree with most of what you wrote, but if I remember correctly, Bush's approval ratings were heading downward until 9/11 when they shot up to the 80 percent range, and than began dropping again. It's true that a large portion of the American public doesn't pay close attention, but I don't know if you can entirely attribute that to innate stupidity or the fact that we are the most overworked nation on earth. People who are toiling 12-14 hours a day just to keep even don't have much time to stay informed, and there's unfortunately plenty of misinformation passed along as 'news' by the Big Media; OTOH, those who continually vote against their own interests could legitimately be called 'stupid,' but I think the truly dumb really number no more than about 30 percent of the American electorate. A wealthy industrialist once said, "Ten percent run the world, ten percent watch them run it, and eighty percent don't know what the hell's going on."

Pick eight people at random from a crowd and two or three of them are bound to be stupid.

Speaking of quotes, as H.L. Mencken wrote back in the '20s, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

I guess the recent worhip of all things Michael Jackson bears that out.

Evelyn said...

Twitter....yeah. If you want to get my opinion- and I'm sure you want to know, don't you? ( bwa-ha-ha) check out my elaborate response to the latest scourge on the planet.
http://evelynsrockpages.blogspot.com
Thanks one and all !

Anonymous said...

Do you have copy right rules? One of your cartoons was on a web site with the wording changed. Is this allowed?