The Constitution: God's Gift to America

Did not know that Jesus Christ authored the U.S. Constitution himself. That's how it appears, at least, in this painting which was passed around the internet this week.

Hover your mouse over the image to reveal details, including Ronald Reagan, Nathan Hale, a non-Christian immigrant (now seeing the light), a smug college professor holding Darwin's Origin of Species, Satan, and that most pernicious of Supreme Court decisions, Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee (1816).

What's not clear from the painting is whether Jesus is holding a copy of the Constitution that includes the 14th Amendment, or whether his version maintains that whole "three-fifths of a person" bit from Article I.

Of course the internet loves to eat itself, so now there's an alternate version of the painting with alternative captions.

Original:

Farmer
Truly the backbone of America.

Revised:

Farmer
The government pays him not to grow stuff. Is against government handouts.

[via Andrew Sullivan]

Matters of Life and Twitter

Recently an underemployed "analytics" firm looked at Twitter usage and announced via press release that 40% of tweets are "pointless babble." Stephen Fry expressed his disappointment on his blog that the number was so low:

I would have hoped 100% of Twitter was fully free of earnestness, usefulness and commercial intent. (Link)

Many of the people I follow on Twitter are inveterate wisenheimers, who have spent months (or years) chiding, mocking, and bitterly assailing those who attempt use the service for earnest, useful purposes.

This past January, however, Josh Hopkins, a popular (and often profane) member of the Favrd comedy crowd interrupted his flow of jokes with something unexpected.

Deficits could force the post office to continue reading your dirty magazines and delivering the rest of your mail to your neighbor. (Link)

and

Turns out, pregnant women don't want their body mass index calculated. God. Obese people can be so rude. (Link)

were followed by

On the way to the hospital. Baby and mom aren't doing so well. May deliver today. More details to come. (Link)

and shortly thereafter

Getting transported to NICU for C-section immediately. Baby has a heart defect. Not sure what's going to happen. I'll update after delivery. (Link)

Finally, a few hours later, just:

Lucy Kate Hopkins http://twitpic.com/18wad (Link)

and

Lucy is 2lbs. 1.5oz. & 13 1/2 in. Mom and baby are okay. Thank you everyone. You guys are so awesome. (Link)

Lucy Kate Hopkins was born 10 weeks premature, with two congenital heart defects and Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome). She remained in the hospital for 75 days before Josh and his wife could bring her home.

When my own son was born he spent the first hour of his life in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) while they monitored his oxygen levels. Christa was being sewn up following the unplanned C-section, and I stood there by myself, watching my little boy attached to monitors and machines, unable to pick him up and hold him to me. The NICU was a lonely and frightening place, even knowing that he was going to be fine soon.

Contrast that with a baby like Lucy Kate, for whom the first few hours (or days) offer no easy assurances of survival. And yet Josh, the father, took the time to tap out a few words to a thousand strangers with whom he had previously shared little more than 140-character poop and dick jokes.

"Thank you everyone. You guys are so awesome."

This in response to the dozens (possibly hundreds) of heartfelt and humorous Twitter replies and messages he had received on his mobile device from this virtual community in support of him and his family during the early hours of their ordeal.

The NYT this week published a story about parents who suffer from PTSD following their experiences in the NICU with their premature infants. It quotes from Vicki Forman's new book, This Lovely Life. In it she writes “From the moment my twins were born, I saw potential for tragedy wherever I turned. It would be years before I stopped thinking that way.”

As he had before his NICU experience, Josh Hopkins saw potential humor wherever he turned, and shared it with the audience in his pocket.

Lucy weighs 2lbs. 11oz. today. I'm concerned about her weight gain. I think the Skittles I've secretly been feeding her are making her fat. (Link)

Looking at all the tubes, syringes and meth on the kitchen countertop, you would think we were running a meth lab instead of feeding a baby. (Link)

I don't know Josh Hopkins. I can't claim to know the many ways in which Lucy's health challenges and her time in the hospital have affected him or his wife. I do imagine that were their story to be introduced into the maelstrom of bullshit and bloviation that passes for "mainstream" discourse on television and Op-Ed columns and the internet, Josh would be accused of all manner of transgressions of decency, mental health, common sense, and taste (the latter I expect he would wear proudly), for sharing his experience in this way using something as public and "pointless" as Twitter.

And what interests me is not just Josh's story, but the experience of the 3000+ of his Twitter followers who have been "listening in" over the past week as Lucy has gone back into the hospital for heart surgery. In the middle of our days we've received updates of Lucy being placed on heart bypass, of her sternum being closed, of her arms and legs wiggling for the first time after sedation, of her being taken off the respirator, then back on again.

And of course Josh has had time to Twitter, because the experience of a family member in the hospital is nothing but endless stretches of time, waiting in an outer room, "showering" in restroom sinks, being unable to contribute in any meaningful way.

My wife and I finally ate burritos. I imagine it was like watching two lions attack a pack of zebras on the Discovery Channel. (Link)

Sleeping in the waiting room is the best sleep I've never gotten. (Link)

And using a different account, Josh is Twittering in the voice of Lucy:

Still not feeling well. My right lung is partially collapsed, but the doctors are taking care of me. I can't wait to wake up and play soon! (Link)

I'm starting to be more awake now. I tried to cry out but I couldn't, so my Daddy sang to me to keep me calm. (Link)

Again, the "friends" in Josh's pocket have responded to him, with messages of encouragement and more. A couple of folks helped manage donations to the family through Josh's Amazon Wish List, or cash donations through PayPal. Someone else thought to set up a special link to the new book Twitter Wit--featuring several contributions by Josh (and one by me)--through which a portion of each purchase would be given to Josh's family.

Myself, I feel paralyzed when trying to put something meaningful into a Twitter-sized burst of text to someone I don't really know who's sitting scared shitless in a hospital as his five-month-old is undergoing open heart surgery. Even though it's clear from Josh's tweets that the encouragement matters. And that it's okay if what you write is trite or if someone's said it before, and said it better than you.

But my own emotional and superegotistical roadblocks have kept me from writing much of anything to Josh, or to @AinsleyofAttack when her mother died, or to @Moltz as he sat alone reading Twitter messages while his wife was undergoing her double mastectomy in the wake of her breast cancer diagnosis. Then again I'm also the asshole who doesn't leave birthday wishes on people's Facebook walls.

Looking at my Facebook news feed yesterday, it was clogged from top to bottom with people's reflections on the death of Ted Kennedy--some thoughtful, some emotional, some with links to words or video from elsewhere. That's a fair amount of emotional and attentional bandwidth for someone none of these people personally knew.

Kottke blogged last week about the coming "abundance of death", in which the rate at which someone we are aware of (the famous and the micro-famous) will die will increase to a daily (or more than daily) event. The day will come sooner than that when death, tragedy, or life-threatening illness will affect the lives of someone we "know" on our digital social networks.

What will it mean to our psyches and emotional consciousness to have this persistent window into the hardships of so many individuals in something approximating "real time"? To receive up-to-the-minute updates of difficult labors, car accidents, families trapped in attics as floodwaters rise, kids dying of gunshot wounds, parents with Alzheimer's slowly slipping away? Tiny Lucy's journey has occupied a fair amount of my emotional space this week (and the time it has taken to write these 1500 words).

Then again, it doesn't fucking matter how hard it is for me to peer through these tiny, text-based windows into the suffering of others from the vantage point of my life (and its privilege and blessings).

What matters--to Josh, or to anyone who posts a Twitter message or Facebook status from a place of loneliness, pain, or fear--is the window out.

===========================================

Give some money to Josh and his family. You can follow Josh or Lucy on Twitter. Then, if you still feel like it, you can buy the Twitter Wit book through the special link. It's pretty funny. I show up on page 107.

===========================================

UPDATE: (September 14, 2009) Lucy Kate's progress is being shared on her own blog. Josh is raising money for the Indiana Down Syndrome Foundation in Lucy Kate's name.

100 days of Obama: the Facebook news feed

Slate writers Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson relive the first 100 days of the Obama administration through the lens (and language) of Facebook:



If you're not on Facebook (or not extremely in tune with Washington politics) a few of the jokes might fall with a thud. But I totally loved this.

I'd have more to say about it, but I need to go catch up on Lost.

Link

The post-news world

Two brilliant and provocative reads on the future of news (and the collapse of the newspaper business) burned through blogs and RSS readers this week. Both writers sit far enough outside of the industry to offer a clear perspective and to be ignored by anyone inside the industry with the power to change it. (Although you can be sure journalists themselves were emailing each other about both pieces all week.) Both pieces attempt to confront the paradox of ever-falling revenue and ever-increasing readership.

Clay Shirky presents the more harsh vision of the future, which he telegraphs in his title, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable."

He compares our current, electronic shift in information distribution to the invention of the printing press and italic type, and the massive cultural shifts those helped make possible. (Copernicus, anyone? The Protestant Reformation?)

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Shirky doesn't claim to know what journalism will look like once the revolution is completed. He does believe that the future lies not in the hands of the newspaper publishers, but in the hands of the dozens (even hundreds, or thousands) of experimenters who are attempting wholly new ways of connecting people to information (and to each other).

Steven Johnson shortens the lens to look at his own past as a media consumer in a speech he delivered at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin entitled "Old Growth Media and the Future of News".

He describes days he spent in his youth checking the bookstore repeatedly for the arrival of each new issue of Macworld, a magazine he relied on for news that was weeks (if not months) out-of-date by the time he read it. He contrasts that time (just 20 years ago) with the overabundance of news and information he now has at his fingertips via the world wide web.

Johnson, the author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, is far more of an optimist than Shirky. He articulates a vision for the future of professional journalists and news organizations, and asserts that on the other side of the demise of the local paper will be an even greater awareness of the news in one's neighborhood.

I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events...

As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.

Both posts are worth your time.

Shirky's essay is here. Johnson's is here.

And, for a bit of additional fun, here's a feature that ran on KRON-TV in San Francisco in 1981(!) about the future of "electronic newspapers", delivered via modem to your home "computer".



YouTube link

Who is on Twitter

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones rounds up just who is using Twitter, including:

• people who are just back from a really awesome run

• people who are involved in "social networking" and optimizing the power of re-Tweeting and "computers"

• people who are hungry

• people who can't figure out what their kids want to eat

• Rachel Maddow

Go read the entire list

(Via Scott Simpson.)

Yes We Can (hold babies).

An entire blog devoted to photos of Obama (and Biden) with infants and children on the campaign trail. Seeing babies being crowd-surfed over to the candidate is both awesome and vaguely alarming.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

Got Cowbell?

SNL. 2000. Will Farrell. Christopher Walken. "More Cowbell" sketch.

Web. 2008. Your mp3 collection. A web developer with a lot of time on his hands. Cowbell.

Add cowbell to any mp3 file.

Also, add Christopher Walken.

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

I'll See Your "Jordan Jesse Go" and Raise You: The Bugle

For a while I was limiting my comedy podcasts to bootleg RSS feeds of the CBC's Wiretap --Jonathan Goldstein's weekly offering which lands somewhere between a solo sitcom and a Larry David-inflected version of NPR's This American Life.

But while it was funny, it was an acquired taste. Like David Sedaris' work, you had to get used to the voice, and then the mind behind the voice, and over time, as you got to understand Goldstein's quirks and the regular foibles of his co-stars, the humor built up occasionally into laugh out loud moments.

Then the feed stopped. Don't know why.

Then, a chance bit of Facebook trivia ("Brett S. has joined the group The Bugle- Audio Newspaper for a visual world") led me to follow the link to, of all places, the The Times Online, the web site for one of the United Kingdom's national newspaper.

The Bugle has British comedy writers John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman dissect the news of the week. They've been compared to The Onion, but fake news is a mere 5-10% of their show. They comment on the news-- it's more like The Daily Show (Oliver, is, in fact, a writer and correspondent for that show).

The two hosts also play off each other, like the Car Talk guys, but, I have to say, English accents work way better for this shtick than Boston ones.

With Zaltzman based in London, and Oliver in New York, they tend to cover world affairs... and it's surprising how many laughs they can generate over political violence in Zimbabwe, the war in Iraq, the global response to climate change (true, much of the humor is at the expense of the United States). The international perspective on American politics is nice to hear, and they even make British sports (rugby, cricket, football) funny knowing that their American audience has little idea what they are talking about.

At least one laugh out loud moment, usually more, per episode.
3 out of 4 episodes will actually find me in tears from laughing so hard.

Available on iTunes, or get episodes here: The Bugle

Meet the Wisenheimers: Twitter's Comedy Underground, Part 2

In Part 1 of this essay I wrote (in 1800+ words) about how Twitter's pack of wisecracking kids evolved to the point where they are today. As more funny people hop on board, one can expect that the "community" will fracture and fall apart, with misunderstandings and blood feuds and decades-long grudges, until the children of this first generation of Twitterers grow up, meet, and fall in love, against the wishes of their embittered parents.

Let's say you're just starting out on Twitter and are daring it to entertain you. In this, the second and final part of this epic post, I'll answer the question: "Who should I follow?" And I'm not including Robert Scoble or Kevin Rose. (You can also take Nick Douglas' advice on the matter.)

As with all forms of comedy, your mileage may vary. Click on a thumbnail to visit each person's individual page to decide for yourself.

Women on Twitter who make me laugh

@AmyJane Married to @gruber (see below). Mercilessly unafraid to skewer her husband or four-year-old son to get a laugh.

AmyJane Doctor asked me what I use for birth control. I should have told her that my husband takes photos of bad quotation marks. That's all I need.

@communicatrix Former advertising copywriter (and erstwhile compadre of Ana Gasteyer) Colleen Wainwright.

communicatrix I'm either going to have to rethink the "pistachios as reward" thing or the "fitting in these pants" thing.

@EffingBoring Rachel, from Brooklyn, "dynamite with a laser beam; extraordinarily nice." Partial to hiphop quotations and dick jokes. Recent winner of the You Look Nice Today white carnation.

EffingBoring Clothes shopping at Target. Apparently "in" this season: looking ambiguously pregnant, patterns that clash with themselves, yelling at kids.

@verdandi Criminally underfollowed. Expert observational humorist, brilliant absurdist.

verdandi Found 4 pens stuck in my hair, and it's not even noon.

@phillygirl A lot happens "offscreen" in phillygirl's tweets.

phillygirl You'd think singing "Domino Dancing" (incl. horn solo) while waiting in line would act as a deterrent to conversation-starting. You'd think.

@ShuffShuffGraduating high school senior, New Hampshire.

ShuffShuff Someone asked if I would sell them my Fugly Satirical Sunglasses today. "... but you're not supposed to *like* them!" Ugh, fuck fashion.

@echuckles Elizabeth Chuck, NYC. Has an ambivalent relationship with the shift key.

echuckles i've got a lot of questions about olives. like, a LOT

@ohheygreat Leah, student splitting time between Berkeley and the OC. Self-admitted total spaz; boss of the run-on sentence.

ohheygreat Have you ever scratched your nose & noticed your hand smells like horse only you haven't petted one in weeks and what the fuck did I touch.

@brittneyg Brittney Gilbert, Berkeley/SF. Uses Twitter for reasons other than cracking jokes, but can be funny when she wants to be.

brittneyg Yes, Wolf Blitzer, I am in the Situation Room, but it is not by my own hand, and I want the fuck out.

@kissane Writer and editor, Portland.

kissane Reason #85,097 not to live in Kentucky: Dramatically increased chance of discovering dead guy on your morning walk to the river.

@vmarinelli Victoria Marinelli, Richmond, VA. Seriously high-volume (not everyone is willing to follow her, for this reason). Flirts endlessly (and profanely) with women and men alike, but I find her parenting tweets the funniest.

vmarinelli Second to last day of our health insurance. Anybody in this house wants to get sick over the next few months, they'd better do it RIGHT NOW.

@AinsleyofAttack Ainsley Drew, freelance writer out of Portland. Smart, biting, with an aggressively raunchy (bi-) sexual persona that is spinning the wisenheimer boys into a bit of a frenzy. A bit much for my own tastes at times, but she's hella good at what she does.

AinsleyofAttack At the grocery store I just checked a girl out so hard they had to call for clean up. Cuidado, piso mojado.

@dooce "Mommy blogger" Heather "Dooce" Armstrong

dooce The 80-yr-old man on the treadmill next to mine was running twice as fast as I was, but I win because I had cuter shoes.

and then there are also boys

@SeoulBrother "Half Seoul. All brother." Up for any meme, any time. From his swipes at conference calls I gather that he has a job, but I also imagine his bosses don't realize what they are paying him for.

SeoulBrother Countering your 'monetize' with 'mad chedda.' Now that's playing the race card. Also, knuckle bumping is over. Draw 4. Uno. OUT.

@Remiel An early winner of the You Look Nice Today white carnation for tweets such as:

Remiel Tact is the art of deciding between "not really interested" or "really not interested."

@Moltz John Moltz, creator of the parodic Apple fan site Crazy Apple Rumors. Went on an extended, hallucinogenic tear through the TED conference (which, one suspects, he did not actually attend.)

Moltz At TED: Not proud of it, but I just had to punch Doris Kearns Goodwin in the face. Actually, you know what? I am proud of it. *Sick of her.*

@badbanana Tim Siedell, Nebraska. Surreal, minimalist one-liners from America's heartland. Doesn't just hang with the wisenheimers (he follows 700+ other people on Twitter).

badbanana Soon, I won't be able to afford my favorite meal of rice and crude oil.

@gknauss Greg Knauss. Was funny before Twitter.

gknauss Packing away kid crafts and becoming convinced that goddamned glitter should be banned. Next: Vacuuming, apparently.

@gruber John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame. Most of his tweets are about coding or Apple Inc. (neither of which may interest you), but he is the starting point for many a Twitter meme. Also worth following as the butt of many of @AmyJane's jokes.

gruber Fell down the stairs 15 minutes ago. Goddamn wife is still fucking laughing about it.

@magnetbox Ben Tesch, web designer/developer, Seattle.

magnetbox Take out the mixed case, and an e-mail exclaiming "There Will Be Blood shipped to you and arriving on or around Friday" doesn't sound good.

@zeldman Jeffrey Zeldman, co-founder, A List Apart.

zeldman Last time I checked my ass, I couldnt pull that kind of work out if it.

@jimray Journalist/ruffian from Seattle.

jimray Man, once a Sharepoint site gets created, it goes from project to Project Managed!

@nevenmrgan Developer (you might be sensing a trend), Portland.

nevenmrgan At Chipotle, a friend orders a "small burrito". In the back, an old woman cackles menacingly - "Small!" - then vanishes in a cloud of smoke.

@textism Dean Allen. Another damn developer; this one the creator of Favrd, the site that captures the wisenheimers' favorite tweets.

textism Please shut the fuck up about Comic Sans. Comic Sans isn’t the problem. Times New Roman is the problem.

Other wisenheimer favorites include @Mike_FTW, @FarkerPeaceboy, @fedge, @awryone, @fireland, @strutting, fake clippings from a @larrykingcolumn, and an obscene fake @soupysales.

plus some you may know from other contexts

@hodgman THAT John Hodgman. Still trying to figure out how to use Twitter, but getting there.

@hodgman SOMETHING BRIEF AND HILARIOUS That is all.

@jonathancoulton Internet geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton. Posts infrequently, mostly texted from the road or while he's on parent duty.

@jonathancoulton Dippin Dots is the ice cream of a future that I don't want any part of.

@apelad Cartoonist Adam Koford, creator of the LOLCats comic.

@apelad In Soviet Russia, your pants spill salsa all over _you_.

@youngamerican Jesse Thorn, from The Sound of Young America and Jordan, Jesse, GO!

@youngamerican Do you ever get jealous of observant jews? They always look like they're goin' places.

@Jordan_Morris Boy detective. The Jordan half of Jordan, Jesse, GO! New this week to Twitter, but already getting the hang of it.

@Jordan_Morris Nintendo: Trying to combine video games and exercise is like trying to combine sex and punching.

@jdickerson John Dickerson, Slate political writer and co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest. One of the few wisenheimers that follows the election, in part because it's his actual job.

jdickerson It's not just Kentucky bluegrass that's music to my ears but the comforting victory state pun at the top of every one of my speeches.

and the hosts of You Look Nice Today

The current hub of Twitter comedy culture is the podcast "You Look Nice Today" (read Part 1 for more), hosted by @scottsimpson, @lonelysandwich, and @hotdogsladies.

@scottsimpson

@scottsimpson I figured it out. The spider, whose web I break every morning en route to my car? He's not stupid--his insurance company is.

@scottsimpson The music in your car always sounds like the soundtrack to a movie I don't want to see." —my wife

@scottsimpson Bathroom key fob size inflation is rampant in SF. At some point the key is just going to be bolted to a barista.

@lonelysandwich

@lonelysandwich My heart is telling me one thing and my bangs are telling me something completely different.

@lonelysandwich If the headline "Obama breaks with former pastor" makes me picture them popping and locking, it doesn't mean I'm racist, just nostalgic.

@lonelysandwich If there's a way of looking good while a pigeon flies INTO YOUR FACE, I'm one step closer to finding it.

@hotdogsladies

@hotdogsladies American Apparel tailors their shirts for men who aren't fortunate enough to share my sophisticated relationship with pie.

@hotdogsladies Oh, great. Now I smell like Febreze AND a warm hoagie.

@hotdogsladies Nice thing about a 2-year waiting list for a $7k purse is you can use the time to start sorting out exactly what the fuck is wrong with you.

in closing

I'm certain I've omitted several people. Just doing my part to get the blood feuds up and running. (Updated 6/9: Case in point: @nevenmrgan)

As I explained in Part 1, one can always find new Twitterers to follow by checking the Favorites page of anyone whose sensibility you appreciate. Or by keeping an eye on the front page of Favrd.

Of course not everyone on Twitter uses the platform solely as a hyperactive, distributed class to clown in. You might even decide to follow people you actually, you know, know.

But figure if you're still reading at this point you might decide to follow me:

@cjereneta I do not have a job that allows me to Twitter. Hang on--missing a period in there. I meant: I do not have a job. That allows me to Twitter.

Once I manage to build up a steady income we'll see for how long I can manage to stick around.

Meet the Wisenheimers: Twitter's Comedy Underground, Part 1

When I first joined Twitter, I mostly followed other videobloggers (who generally would follow me back) and famous people (who generally would not). As a social network Twitter has a one-way affinity structure, meaning you can follow people without them having to follow you in kind.

(I linked to a video earlier about what Twitter is and why a normal person might be interested in it.)

This one-way architecture means you get to choose whose 140-character or shorter posts ("tweets", in the vernacular) show up in your Twitter feed. I often describe it as a custom CNN newscrawl, in which you have pre-selected the writers for the content you expect they will provide. Or alternately as a steady stream of office chatter by workmates that you have hand-picked for their conversational value.

It's therefore up to you how to tune your mix of breaking news, tech convention updates, meetup invites, party gossip, internet links, lunch reports, clarifying insights, wisecracks, and updates from people you actually know. This process happens over time, as you follow new people, or "unfollow" others (because they tweet too often, or because they irritate or bore you).

By the time I joined in fall of 2007, Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) had already attracted thousands of followers for his snappy one-liner tweets—a hilarious mix of hype-deflating similes, wince-inducing self-deprecations, adolescent dick jokes, and inside nerdball. Most people know Mann from his productivity blog 43folders.com or the podcast MacBreak Weekly, but he had already spent years honing his minimalist writing skills on his site of ridiculous lists, 5ives. But on Twitter, Mann had something something apotheosis something something. (sic)

One of @hotdogsladies's social groups on Twitter was a cluster of wisecracking Mac software developers¹ he already knew, the most "famous" of whom, John Gruber, author of the popular daringfireball.net², had built up a Twitter following as large as Mann's. Where others might use the 140-character space for a quick, cheap aside, @gruber shot through it with the blunt force trauma of swiftly-delivered declamatory statements, made definitive (and often hilarious) with the masterful application of punctuation, capitalization, and well-placed expletives.

Thus another social cluster began to form that had no connection prior to Twitter, around a culture of using Twitter almost entirely for the purpose of cracking wise. These like-minded Twitterers found each other using two of the site's built-in features.

While the "follow" stream is one-way, the use of the "@" tag allows anyone to "reply" to people upstream from them. The person who doesn't currently follow you can choose to ignore your reply, or (if you are annoying) block you (meaning you can't follow or reply to them any more). But if s/he reads your reply, and likes it, s/he might click over to read some of your other tweets, and decide that you're worth following yourself.

The second feature, one that isn't used by the majority of Twitter users, is the "favorite". Next to each tweet (in the standard web page interface) is the graphic of a star. Click it, and that tweet is added to your list of "Favorites", publicly accessibly via your profile. So you can check out the Favorites list of someone you find funny to discover Twitterers that person finds funny.

So like bloggers who constantly check their stats for traffic volume and incoming links, these jokesters wanted a way to find out who was marking a tweet they wrote as a "favorite". One could click through to the individual Favorites page of every person who followed them, but that could get tiresome, even for those with serious self-esteem issues.

Along came the website Favotter, the side project of a solo Japanese developer, which scraped Twitter for the Favorites selections of about 1,000 Twitterers who used the feature the most often. At last the wisenheimers could track which of their tweets had "scored" with their peers (and with how many of them). Favotter could also be used to discover new "talent", by scanning which tweets were being recognized by one or more peers.

Favotter accelerated the speed of the Twitter ego feedback loop, turning this small corner of Twitter into a near-constant stream of witticisms, profanities, and absurdities. (Remember that there were hundreds of thousands of Twitter users who were using Twitter for entirely different purposes.) The Favotter one-upsmanship among the wisenheimers was generally offset by how generous everyone could be (and was) with the Favorites star. Unlike, say, the Onion writers' room, there was no numerical limit on the number of jokes that could get the thumbs up. More popular Twitterers would also call attention to those with fewer followers.

Another third party tool was the startlingly good search tool, Summize, which offers near-real-time scanning of tweets. Keeping Summize open in a tab allows one to check quickly to see if someone has already made the joke you're about to submit.



This spring @hotdogsladies (with, at that point, more than 13,000 followers) started an audio podcast with two of his favorite Twitterers, @scottsimpson (Scott Simpson) and @lonelysandwich (Adam Lisagor). "You Look Nice Today: A Journal of Emotional Hygiene", brought the Twitter underground comedy scene into a much broader internet underground (readers of Boing Boing, maximumfun.org, John Hodgman's blog). People in the internet community had known Simpson previously (from his podcast-related job), but Lisagor, a digital special-effects artist from LA, was new to everyone, having emerged as a minor Favotter star with his absurdist, often mindbending tweets. (@lonelysandwich responded to a series of running Mavis Beacon tweets with this brilliantly topical image.) The trio credit themselves in the show only by their Twitter handles, and have presented virtual carnations to wisenheimers whose tweets they respect (@Remiel, @Moltz, @EffingBoring).

"You Look Nice Today" (@ylnt) is more of an improvisational highwire act than Jordan, Jesse, GO! (which grounds itself with personal anecdotes and listener calls, and is built upon years of comfortable banter both on- and off-air). For YLNT, Mann, Simpson, and Lisagor step onto a metaphorical empty stage and bluster their way through each segment with the manic energy and desperation of college freshmen--hence the May 12 episode, which spent an exorbitant number of minutes describing an imagined early 1980s television show ("The Barber & The Balls") featuring Richard Roundtree as a barber who travels from town to town, solving crimes, with the aid of his talking testicles, as voiced by Estelle Getty. But the sharp editing (by Lisagor) manages to keep the show from falling down, and helps frame the uncomfortable moments as entirely intentional.

(YLNT and JJGo are teaming up for a live show called "The Monsters of Podcasting". Tickets, promoted only through Twitter, sold out in hours. Not sure if I'm going to attempt to get rush tickets on site.)

Many of the bits from YLNT then spread through Twitter, including The Fishstick, a dance set to Archie Bell & The Drells' "Tighten Up" that involves standing in one place and looking from side to side (while, optionally, performing one's kegels). They encouraged listeners to create their own "Fishstick" videos (the video by @lonelysandwich, however, eclipsed them all).

Meanwhile Favotter was having sporadic outages, causing consternation among the wisecrack-addicted. New players³ were unable to participate in the Favotter system even when it did work, because the Twitterers whose votes counted were limited to the original 1000 chosen when Favotter was launched. And Favotter also didn't distinguish between tweets marked as favorites because of their cleverness or because of their utility or "wisdom" (as applied to life or, more often, web startups and "social media").

Enter developer Dean Allen (@textism), who built his own custom tool to scrape Twitter for favorites, called Favrd, that recognized only votes by people in the extended wisenheimer community⁴ (what Mann had taken to calling the "Fun Bunch"). Allen described this exclusivity as his "no-webcock algorithm":

If you see Twitter as a venue for public relations or marketing, or as an audience eager to hear news of a post on your ‘blog’, or a rich hot sticky vertical, or if you consider yourself a web strategist, or if you talk earnestly about social media, or if you can read Techcrunch or listen to the Gillmor gang with a straight face, it’s very unlikely the things you say on Twitter will show up here.

but in what I take as an acknowledgement that his own elitism could itself be labelled "webcockery", Allen made the main graphic for the site an enormous rooster.



Favrd is now the go-to site for the latest in what's funny or clever on Twitter. Two thumbs up by the eligible pool of voters places your tweet on the front page of the site, until it's pushed off by the next wave of favorite tweets. At its worst, like Favotter, Favrd preys on the insecurities of the wiseacre crowd. But at its best, it highlights the work of new and funny Twitterers who have few followers. One can subscribe to the RSS feed of the Favrd main page to keep a finger on the pulse of the Twitter comedy scene without even signing up at Twitter.

As to what's popular among the wisenheimers (who are, mind you, predominantly white and technophilic geeks)? The brevity of the form is well suited to puns and verbal jokes that tweak grammar and punctuation. Rapid digressions in the style of Steven Wright or Jack Handey also work well. But someone stepping in cold will mostly notice all the dick, poop, and fart jokes ("puerile", which I use in the strictest, non-pejorative sense of the word) The influx of vagina-themed raunch from a handful of women has made waves of late, but not enough to displace the boy-centric vibe. Memes burn through and out in a matter of hours these days, such that last week one morning was taken up by tweets responding to a reported meme shortage.

Twitter itself has been having a lot of infrastructural issues, with its database servers down almost as often as they were up over the past week or two. There is some talk in the internet community at large that Twitter is vulnerable to a competitor swooping in and taking its business. At this point I doubt the "Fun Bunch" will pick up and move, unless a new platform will play as well to both their strengths and their emotional need for validation.

Not that I would know anything about that.

Next up in Part 2, some of the Twitterers who make me laugh.

---

¹ I'm not sure if there is a parallel community of funny, outsized Windows or Linux developers, but I'd assert that this particular clique was propped up by the iPhone, arguably the best mobile Twitter device available in the Fall of 2007.

² I'll also note here that Gruber is unparalleled in his outsider analysis of Apple Inc. His blog posts, though at times ridiculously granular in their content, suggest he has a greater big-picture understanding of the company than many of the people I know who work there.

³ I'd include myself here, at this point a wisenheimer-wannabe.

⁴ I was surprised as anyone that I was included in this first pool of voters.

The podcast that is just about my favorite anything these days

I don't get out to movies that much these days, and rarely it seems have two hours to consume movies on DVD. There are TV shows that I watch, and books I read, and intermanet properties that I consume.

But, and I can't believe I haven't mentioned this before, my favorite anything these days is the audio podcast Jordan, Jesse GO! featuring Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris.



I started sometime around Episode 40 last fall (Ep 62 came out this week), and have since gone back to begin to listen to the complete archive of the show.

Thorn's flagship program is The Sound of Young America, which he distributes as both a podcast and as a public radio show to select stations via PRI. But Jordan, Jesse GO! is why I contribute to his small media empire (MaximumFun.org) every month. (He's having a pledge drive now, and I am considering upping my monthly subscription rate.)

It is difficult to describe the appeal of JJGO! At face value, the concept of two straight white guys in their twenties riffing into microphones for an hour and a half sounds horrific. But their peculiar mix of earnestness, nerdiness, fake irony, and ridiculousness keeps me entertained week after week.

I'll finally note that Ira Glass and his wife both listen to the show (he has interviewed Jesse about it, and she has called into the program).

Try episode 40 on for size. If you're not hooked after that, you're out of the wedding.

NSFW: Bill O'Reilly Dance Remix

The remix of the O'Reilly off-air difficulties that have been travelling across the internets this week.

embedded ambivalently from Today's Big Thing, who never seem to credit their original sources. via my tweeps Steve Garfield / Chuck Olsen