Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

'Trump' ist Deutsch für 'no bottom'

There is not a single one of the Trumps fit to wash Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's skivvies. According to those who knew Donald Trump Jr., in college, the boy could have earned a minor in underwear-washing.

Friday, November 15, 2019

Dude's a #£¢§´#% miracle of modern medicine

I think our present state of affairs in these United (for now) States may lie somewhere between laughing to keep from crying . . . and dying laughing. That last thing isn't meant to be figurative.

God help us all, because we certainly haven't been able to help ourselves.

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

Didn't we all see this coming?


The most staggeringly unfit man ever to be president of the United States looks for all the world like he's trying to start the civil war he's been tweeting about this week.

I'm starting to think he might succeed. If you don't think that's enough of a possibility to be much afraid right now, you either are in denial or haven't been paying attention.

God help us.

I hate 2019. It's as bad as 2018 . . . and 2017 . . . and. . . .

Donald Trump's Amerika reminds me of the punch bowl where all the turds like to hang out.

Thursday, September 05, 2019

The emperor has no brain

The president of the United States is pictured here expecting
Americans to buy what no second-grade teacher would

This will not be a lengthy post, mainly because I don't know what you really can say about displays of Category 5 crazy.

Either you recognize moonbattery when you see it . . . or you're a moonbat.

President Donald Trump proved once again Wednesday that he's a couple tacos shy of a combination plate. The man (or one of his obsequious staffers) doctored -- with a black marker, no less -- a hurricane forecast map from last week to "prove" that Alabama so too coulda been "hit hard" by Hurricane Dorian.

All because Trump tweeted this Sunday morning:


NOW, BY SUNDAY morning, everybody following the storm (except Trump, apparently) knew Dorian was going to come nowhere near Alabama. The only way you could write what Trump wrote in his tweet is if you are a) bat-shit crazy, b) suffering from dementia, c) have no fucking idea which of those states down there is Alabama . . . or d) all of the preceding.

My money's on D.

Trump began tweeting Sunday morning at 7:25. Between then and 7:58 a.m., he tweeted, retweeted and rage tweeted a number of things. Three of the retweets, in chronological order were these:



IN THE LAST retweet, the National Weather Service forecast map shows a small probability of tropical-storm force winds over a tiny sliver of southeastern Alabama. That would be if the hurricane tracked to the western periphery of the cone of uncertainty -- that is a far, far cry from "will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated."

But what you gonna do? Dotards gonna dotard. Trump's "Alabama" tweet came at 9:51 a.m. Sunday, after all these contradictory retweets.

The non-delusional community quickly responded to all this with a collective "What the fuck?" The press weighed in with a series of "the president erroneously tweeted. . . " dispatches, which is what journalists say when they really mean "What the fuck?"

Many think Trump doctored this as well.
And because the narcissistic nut job in control of 6,000-something nuclear weapons cannot ever be wrong about anything, he soon began rage tweeting about the lying fake-news media's lies about his inability to read a damn map with "circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was." For the record, my beautiful and intelligent wife predicted he would do exactly that.

I was just trying to figure out exactly how drunk I could get before Trump managed to bring about the End of Days.

Then came Wednesday. And the press availability in the Oval Office. And the hurricane map from last week with the Marks-A-Lot makeover.

I WAS WRONG. In this Era of Truthicide, posts about what used to be self-evident can expand way beyond what used to be necessary. You can write reams attempting to convince cultists and true-believers-in-the-unbelievable that the craziness in plain sight is both crazy and in plain sight.

It is a fool's errand, and I plead guilty. In my defense, the alternative is surrender and despair.

In this Age of Trump, is it better to be a fool cupping one's hands around a flickering, dying flame of hope, or better to be a realistic fatalist awaiting the end of one's country . . . one's world . . . the end of reason and truth?

That's the question -- one of the questions -- confronting a country led by an idiot man-child coloring on government maps to make lies into something like the truth.

I don't know what's going to happen between now and November 2020. All I know is this -- whatever happens, however the Age of Trump ends, that this might somehow all end well lies well outside the Cone of Uncertainty.

Farther even than Alabama.

Wednesday, March 06, 2019

Day 1 of Lent: Oy veh!


In case you were wondering how Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, was going around here. . . .

So far, I've punted on Mass and have resorted to trolling the pope on Twitter. Maybe for Lent this year, I'll give up being even cursorily diplomatic.

Don't make me be fed up. You wouldn't like me when I'm fed up.

Friday, June 29, 2018

Oh, for f***'s sake

 
We know the right has lost its mind. It's been happening for years, and the EEG finally flat-lined with the dawning of the Age of Trumpquerulous.


With all the ugliness and stupidity -- and, frankly, Nazification -- of the Republican Party, it has been all too easy to give the Loony Left a pass. Until, of course, Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now the culture wars have gone nuclear (so far just figuratively), and the prospect that somehow, at some time, Roe v. Wade might be overturned has led to widespread hysteria among those who care. Who really care. Who. Really. Really. Care.

Those who care about some women's bodies, just not those in utero. It seems the only shared belief across America's great cultural divide is that everything is a zero-sum proposition. For every winner, there must be a loser, and for every survivor, there must be a corpse in her wake.


For social liberals, dogma says "Kill your kid now. In the womb."

For social conservatives who've given themselves over to the worst devils of the GOP's nature, dogma says "What's your hurry? We can always kill 'em at our leisure after birth. And then we can blame someone else."


BUT I'M NOT HERE to talk about abortion. Or same-sex marriage. Or Obamacare.

I'm not even here to talk about the chipping-away at the Voting Rights Act and the further mischief a conservative court could inflict upon it.

I am here to stare dumbstruck at Item No. 3 on this "progressive" Democrat's Twitter laundry list of "OHMYGAW! OHMYGAW! OHMYGAW" -- Brown v. Board of Education . . .  gone? The court-sanctioned return of "separate but equal"? Jim Crow?

Really?


What the actual f***?

Do you people even listen to yourselves? Don't answer that.


And now, a message from our sponsor.


Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Meanwhile, at the Russian Embassy. . . .


That Donald Trump. He's such a card.

You say covfefe, I say covFEEfay

Click for full size
Things have come to a pretty pass
Our patience is going fast,
For you tweet this and the other
While we sit here aghast

Goodness knows what the end will be
Oh, your shit is just so bat
It looks as if our POTUS is quite plowed
Please, God! Not a mushroom cloud!

You say covFEHfay and I say covFEEfay,
You say GAMMA RAY! and I say YOU'RE CRAY-CRAY!
CovFEHfay, covFEEfay, gamma ray, you're cray-cray
Let's call the whole thing off!

Thursday, August 29, 2013

No, son, they're not calling you a whale


You have your freshman mistakes, and then you have your freshman mistakes that you can't wait to share with the world.

World, meet Ishmail Jackson, Nebraska football walk-on. He was set on being a Husker, and damn if he didn't make the team. The upside to that is obvious enough.

I imagine he's just about to experience the downside -- Coach Bo Pelini's survey course on the cold, hard facts of life. One of those is that Husker football players, even the walk-ons, are public figures. And public figures, if they know what's good for them, do not go on Twitter to disparage Nebraska womanhood.

For example, "98% of the black girls at this school are just disgustingly ugly."

For another example, "Yall [sic] thought florida [sic] had ugly girls? omg lol"

I THINK more than half the University of Nebraska-Lincoln population will be calling young Mr. Jackson something, but it won't be Ishmael. It looks like Uncle Matt -- as in Damon, of movie fame -- never got around to explaining public relations, how it works and why it's important. Or the whole public-figure thing.

Now that talk will come from Coach Bo, who sometimes could be mistaken for Mount Vesuvius. He won't be nearly so smooth as Uncle Matt.

Let's just hope that Jackson, post eruption, isn't mistaken for Pompeii. Which, actually, wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to him.

After all, being an 18-year-old male, he might do something even stupider than scorning half the population, with a soupçon of racial je ne sais quoi for bad measure: He might actually ask a coed for a date. That probably wouldn't end well.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Sandy has a vowel movement


Now, does the extratropical weather system formerly known as Sandy -- or, perhaps, Sndy -- hate vowels, or just hate Gannett?

If it's the latter, she'll have to get in line with lots of employees . . . and former ones.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Tweets from the tolerant



This is America, which now means that if you express the "wrong" opinion, the "right" people are justified in doing any damned thing they want to you.

Three words to that, Roseanne: "Eat mor chikin."

With that, we begin another episode of Tweets From the Tolerant, brought to you by the Internet . . . if you have nothing constructive to say, say it here!

* * *


Suck my d*** chick filet- nazi chicken f***ing pricks

-- Roseanne Barr,

flunked sex ed, biology
(via Twitter)

anyone who eats S*** Fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4Christ

-- Roseanne Barr,
humanitarian

off to grab a s*** fil-A sandwich on my way to worshipping Christ, supporting Aipac and war in Iran.
-- Roseanne Barr,
??????????????????

christian liars: i never wished cancer on you at all-jesus will punish u 4 ur deceit-I said processed foods cause cancer.
-- Roseanne Barr,
angry theologian

I lost two brothers to cancer, Roseanne. What a truly heinous thing to say.
-- Jim Henson,
OBVIOUSLY a hater

Retreading my tweet I realize that I used the wrong word-I shouldn't have used the word deserves

I shouldn't have used the word deserves in my tweet and I apologize

-- Roseanne Barr,
got a call from agent

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

The air that Cher breathes

Cher won't grow up
(She won't grow up)
It's more fun to just emote
(Lots more fun to just emote)
Learn to squawk just like a parrot
(Tweet and squawk just like a parrot)
And spew like a fireboat
(And spew like a fireboat)

If growing up means
It would be beneath her dignity to let her dumbth flow free
She'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not she!
Not her!
Not she!
Not sheeeeeeeeee!

-- Apologies to Carolyn Leigh

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The Twitterian Paradox


"Follow me and I follow you"?

Uh, not exactly.

And not only because of the hypocrisy of it all will I not follow back @followmeback on the Twitters. I will not follow back @followmeback because I'm allergic to spam.

You follow me?

Saturday, October 23, 2010

I'm at Mass Murder (City Hall). http://4sq.com


@tweeples It had to be said. #Fox4DFW #socialmedia #ithadtobesaid #facebookcomments #retweetthisplease #SBuxmacchiatocoupons???!!!

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The banality -- and stupidity -- of evil


DUUUUUDE! My roomie is sooooo gay!

No,
really!

Watch the webcam, dude!
He has no idea, man!

Lookit, I'm putting it on the video chat. Dare you to watch. LOL!

I ought to watch this stoned, dude. This is soooooo f***in' FUNNY!

AH . . . THOSE college hijunks, right? Just a little routine fun for a generation brought up on moral relativism and a deluge of Internet porn, right?

This deadly serious
Associated Press story out of Rutgers begs to differ:
A college student jumped to his death off a bridge a day after authorities say two classmates surreptitiously recorded him having sex with a man in his dorm room and broadcast it over the Internet.

Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge last week, said his family's attorney, Paul Mainardi. Police recovered a man's body Wednesday afternoon in the Hudson River just north of the bridge, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi's.

ABC News and The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Clementi left on his Facebook page on Sept. 22 a note that read: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry." On Wednesday, his Facebook page was accessible only to friends.

Two Rutgers freshmen have been charged with illegally taping the 18-year-old Clementi having sex and broadcasting the images via an Internet chat program.

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said in a statement Wednesday that his group considers Clementi's death a hate crime.

"We are heartbroken over the tragic loss of a young man who, by all accounts, was brilliant, talented and kind," Goldstein said. "And we are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others' lives as a sport."

It wasn't immediately clear what Clementi's sexual orientation was, and a call asking the family's lawyer about it was not immediately returned Wednesday.

One of the defendants, Dharun Ravi, was Clementi's roommate, Mainardi told The Star-Ledger. The other defendant is Molly Wei. Ravi and Wei could face up to five years in prison if they are convicted.


(snip)

A Twitter account belonging to a Ravi was recently deleted, but in a cached version retained through Google he sent a message on Sept. 19: "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

Two days later, he wrote on Twitter: "Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again."
GAY-RIGHTS groups will argue this was an affront against the rights and dignity of gays and lesbians everywhere. That is an incomplete -- and self-serving -- take on such monstrous behavior so casually undertaken.

This act of personal destruction, as sophomoric and banal as it was consequential, was an affront against
human rights and dignity. If the spied-upon roommate had been an 18-year-old female engaged in heterosexual relations, then had been labeled a slut and made fun of . . . all of it live on the Internet in an amateur attempt at pornographic "reality TV" -- and then had become so distraught she took a flying leap off a high bridge, would the whole situation be any less horrific?

Would the crime be any less heinous?

Should the alleged perps, if convicted, get only three months in prison instead of five years?

I didn't think so.

You know, my greatest fear about this generation is it may be one that's lost its grip on dignity. On very old-fashioned notions such as "propriety" and "modesty."

I fear my generation has raised its children to respect all things (and people) in theory, none in practice. May God have mercy on us all.

Not that we deserve it.

Friday, February 19, 2010

The first tweetcom?


Well, if those f***ers want to piss away their money on a show about the s*** I say, just call me the W.C.

I dunno, that just sounds like the kind of s*** Justin Halpern's dad might say about the sitcom pilot based on Halpern's insanely popular Twitter feed and Facebook page, S*** My Dad Says. They've cast William Shatner -- brilliant! -- as Dad in what must be the first television show to emerge out of Twitter.


ANYWAY, The Hollywood Reporter has the straight sh . . . uh . . . scoop on the upcoming tweetcom:
Twitter sensation S*** My Dad Says is becoming a TV pilot with William Shatner set to play the larger-than-life dad at the center of it.

The casting of Shatner lifts the contingency on CBS' multicamera family comedy project based on the Twitter account, which has enlisted more than 1.16 million followers since launching in August and has made its creator, Justin Halpern, an Internet star.

The pilot, executive produced by "Will & Grace" creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, was originally set up at CBS with a script commitment in November. Now, with Shatner on board, it has been greenlighted to pilot.

Halpern co-penned the script with Patrick Schumacker. Halpern and Schumacker co-exec produce the Warner Bros. TV-produced project whose title is expected to change if it goes to series.

Halpern, 29, had moved back in with his parents in San Diego, and on Aug. 3 he launched S*** My Dad Says, a Twitter feed featuring colorful -- often profane -- comments made by his 73-year-old father during their daily conversations.
SPECULATION IS that the suits will change the name of the show to something more TV friendly. The adolescent in me, though, hopes they don't.

Think of the potential marketing campaign and ads -- "Hey! Watch this S***!"

Maybe "We're talking S***. Fridays @ 9."

The Focus on the Family protests would be worth their weight in ratings gold. Am I a bad person for being able to see the marketing possibilities in this?

I don't feel particularly guilty about it, being that -- in my opinion, at least -- it would be several cultural steps up from, say, Gossip Girl.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Spam by any other name. . . .


Newspapers and other dying media are contemplating a social-media strategy for getting advertisers' messages in front of consumer eyeballs.

They're eyeing Twitter, and they call the concept "paid tweets." But I think we all are familiar with the practice under a different name -- spam. Because if a publication's Twitter feed has a similar ratio of ads to "content" as the print product, what Joe Public is going to get in The Daily Blab's feed is upward of 60 percent advertising.

Ad Age can shade this anyway it wants, but when you take an advertiser's money, then use Twitter's infrastructure (on Twitter's dime) to clog up a captive audience's Twitter feed, that makes you a spammer. The only difference, in that case, between The Daily Blab and HootchieMama0896 would be that more of the audience would be more interested in the latter's wares (as opposed to "wears," which would be non-existent).


I MEAN, really:
When Kim Kardashian can ask $10,000 just for sending a marketer's tweet to her 2.8 million followers on Twitter, traditional news companies have to wonder whether they can cash in too.

Many news sites have successfully harnessed Twitter to distribute their stories and build their audiences, after all, but they aren't making money from news tweets yet. Now, though, early exploration is emerging from Los Angeles to New York to Montreal.
Paid-tweet purveyor Ad.ly, the 4-month-old Los Angeles startup, has pitched its services for the most obvious approach, inserting paid tweets among news tweets. So far the big takers are individuals such as Ms. Kardashian, but Ad.ly says major publishers are coming to the table, too.

The New York Times isn't ready to try paid tweets, despite nearly 2.3 million followers for its main Twitter feed -- heady enough territory to ape Ms. Kardashian if it wanted to. "We're taking a bit of a wait-and-see approach on that one," said Denise Warren, senior VP-chief advertising officer at The New York Times Media Group. "We want to be sure that audiences really understand the difference between the paid tweet and the real tweet."

Instead, however, The New York Times Online has started selling packages of ads that appear specifically for visitors who arrive through social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Advertisers can buy certain shares of such readers, typically around 25%, so a page receiving a million visitors via social media would show a participating marketer's ad to 250,000 of them.

The effort, begun last fall, is still too young to gauge. "I couldn't give you projections yet for what we think this is going to yield," Ms. Warren said, declining to identify advertisers that have bought the program. "What we've seen, like most publishers, is that there's more of an acceptance by marketers to embrace these kinds of tools. We're definitely seeing much more interest in these programs."
THE OLD MEDIA, as most anachronisms without a clue are wont to do, are looking for a cheap and dirty way to avoid fundamental change. Usually, that just leads to profound embarrassment before the inevitable -- and ignoble -- demise.

Yes, newspapers (and magazines, and broadcasters) need to find new ways to get the message -- and the ads -- in front of consumers' eyeballs (and ears). But that process is going to be a lot more involved than hijacking Twitter's bandwidth and, in the process, annoying the crud out of the public.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

From an obscure British newspaper


Now, before all you folks in St. Louis go nuts and cause an international incident, remember that the writers at this little-known British newspaper probably eat Marmite, call lines "queues" and stand in them for hours for no discernible reason.

IN OTHER WORDS, they know not what they do (or say) -- they're English:

Twitter has decided to act after Tony La Russa, the coach of an obscure American baseball team, [emphasis mine -- R21] launched a legal action over a fake account. He claimed that postings in which he appeared to make light of the death of two of his players had been ‘hurtful’.

Twitter, which has six million users who can send instant blogs on their activities to anyone who chooses to follow them, denies it has any legal case to answer.

But it is now testing a new system to ensure that users can identify genuine celebrity accounts. In future, a tick alongside a name will guarantee it is genuine.

Until recently, Twitter has had a liberal attitude towards celebrity impostors as long as it was clear that the postings were not genuine.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Hire Alphas, treat 'em like Deltas

There will be a brave new world of journalism someday.

But until it arrives, newspaper management will just live in an Aldous Huxley novel instead.


A CASE IN POINT: The Wall Street Journal.
Staffers at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday were given a newly compiled list of rules for "professional conduct," which included a lengthy guide for use of online outlets, noting cautions for activities on social networking sites.

In an e-mail to employees, Deputy Managing Editor Alix Freedman wrote, "We've pulled together into one document the policies that guide appropriate professional conduct for all of us in the News Departments of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch. Many of these will be familiar."

Dow Jones spokesman Robert Christie declined to comment to E&P today on why the updated rules were put out at this time, saying they speak for themselves. But it is clear they are in place for those involved in social networking on the likes of Facebook or Twitter, requiring editor approval before "friending" any confidential sources.

"Openly 'friending' sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex," the rules state, adding, "don't disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage," and "don't engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work -- no matter how rude or provocative they may seem."
THE ARTICLE in Editor & Publisher, to me, is another omen -- and not a good one -- concerning the future of newspapers in this country. Right up there with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's paean-to-Luddites ad campaign for its "new" Sunday paper.

The fact is, Twitter and Facebook are excellent ways for a journalist to keep his or her "ear to the ground." And the fact is -- isn't it? -- editors of The Wall Street Journal don't hire immature teens or half-wits.

It seems to me, when you're dealing with adults, a few simple rules should be sufficient:
* Don't trash, or bitch about, your colleagues.

*
Don't divulge proprietary information.

*
Act like a grown-up and a professional.

*
Do promote your stories.
THAT'S IT. Break those rules or do something else stupid, and we're going to have a talk.

You really have to wonder how much productivity, innovation, creativity and morale is lost to idiotic micromanagement and pointless corporate bureaucracy. It seems to me that productivity, innovation, creativity and morale are all things American newspapers have lost too much of already.