Tweetdom

Although I have a twitter account, I've mostly reserved it for following my tennis writer friends, tennis players, and musical figures; I've so rarely tweeted that I can't remember my last, Petunia. But I have been wanting to post here and not feeling like I had time, so I think it's time to try a twitxperiment. Try following me at (edited later) libreader and we'll see how this goes; I may want to change to an anonymous name at some point.

Late to the party

Kill me now, I finally joined twitter. I have to admit, tweeting does appeal to me a little bit -- IF I kept it topical, like this blog, rather than tweeting about the banana peel that I slipped on two minutes ago, etc. have not put up a tweet of my own yet. Am skeptical of the whole thing. If I thought people would actually read it, I could see tweeting "I must read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth!" But I don't think anybody would read it. Would you?

I do enjoy following the clever tweeters. Right now, I'm following Stephen Fry, the White House, Rainn Wilson, Jim Courier, Green Day, the Killers, and a couple others. Stephen Fry tweets excessively well, as he does with pretty much anything to do with the English language. Some other Brit comedians I like also tweet (Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross), but they do so much responding (the @soandso posts) that you really can't follow the conversation. I

Like I said, I like the content, but I do feel that the supposed instantaneous communication with your favorite celeb that it provides is rather pernicious. I must be the wrong age bracket for normal folks to tweet. Maybe teens are all following each other in addition to celebs.

ETA: all right, already getting exasperated with trying to find the real celeb instead of the fake one. I couldn't quite decide about aasif_mandvi, but decided to follow him for now. I just think he'd have more followers if it were the real guy from the Daily Show, but I thought the same thing about ice skaters Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, and those accounts are the real deal. Huh. This must be somewhat of an ego risk for anyone vaguely famous.

Hitting the road

Getting ready for another trip: Los Angeles and then Waikiki! Purely for work purposes, I assure you; L.A. for research, Waikiki for a big conference.

I will be blogging for you from my brand new netbook. I'm very excited about this; I haven't had a piece of cutting-edge technology since I was an owner of one of the first-generation clamshell iBooks. People used to come to my dorm room to visit it. Netbooks, in case you don't know, as I did not, are basically tiny computers (about 8" diagonal) meant for light use: websurfing, a little word processing. They have full capability like a built-in webcam and all, mind you, just limited hard drive, but for a light user like myself, they're fully loaded. Best of all? They weigh two pounds. Tuck in the purse and run.

Having dropped my old, heavy laptop only about four times on the last trip, I think I can safely say that this is better for my shoulder and the life of my main machine.