According to WordPress I have saved 887 draft articles so far. No doubt at this point many of these have passed their sell-by date, and are now just idle ruminations on subjects long since out of public consciousness. The world moves quickly, and attention spans move still faster. Well, they move faster than my ability to crank out a few hundred words that meet my criteria for publication, anyway.
Perhaps I could save time by limiting the number of words I use per post, effectively Twitterizing (which is delightfully consonant with trivializing) some entries. How would that look?.
- Special Report: If you send out a “breaking news” alert via e-mail, text message, or Twitter, it had damned well better educate me on a major threat to the health and safety of a significant percentage of the local population. If the urgency relates to a c-list celebrity addict’s latest drunken escapade, or a multimillionaire sports star’s contract, then you’ve just informed the world that your organization no longer understands the concept of news at all, and deserves all the credibility of toilet stall graffiti.
- Digg-Dug: Major new link site Digg was (once again) gamed, this time by a conservative group looking to keep stories with a liberal or progressive angle from being seen. This is my surprised face. The increasing importance of the Internet for decision making by the general public comes with a corresponding increase in manipulation. This is why there are virtually no ranking sites of any real value, particularly since the creation of an industry devoted to insuring that search engines don’t return the most relevant or authoritative resource, but the best financed. And if you think for a moment that there is a web-based poll with any merit whatsoever, you probably also believe that Obama was born in Kenya.
- Fish Food: Miami’s baseball franchise brazenly lied to grandstanding politicians to get out of paying for their own stadium, but since the truth came out after the contracts are signed, nothing will happen. This is my surprised face. Does anyone still believe that a major league team gives anything to a community besides an
extortion letterinvoice? I would point out that begging for public funds to support a private enterprise fails the capitalism smell test, but then I would have to roll my own eyes at myself. - Two Thumbs: Somewhat to my surprise, both Despicable Me and Scott Pilgrim vs the World are pretty good films. The former is actually a wholesome kids movie that still manages to be funny for adults, and without much of the wink-wink innuendo that grabs for the parents’ attention in a kiddie film. The latter is based on an award-winning series of graphic novels, and is a clever and ironic — no, those are not mutually exclusive terms — film about a really rather stupid and unlikeable twenty-something guy stumbling through his video-game and indie-rock obsessed life: Portrait of the Loser as a Young Pixel.
I have more to say about all those bullet points, but eh, whatever. ‘Tis better to puke up quick notes than to take the time to consider your words. Besides, I’m sure I lost most of the readers as soon as they saw four bullets. For modern audiences, Twitter is too wordy. I mean, c’mon. A fake Twitter account has been turned into a sitcom.
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