Keith Starky Explains Twitter

"Jesus Christ! I feel like I’ve been asleep for a thousand years. How long have I been asleep,..."

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:55:12 -0500

“Jesus Christ! I feel like I’ve been asleep for a thousand years. How long have I been asleep, Kip? I must be way behind on my research. Fetch me some coffee, boy! Time to check out my favorite source for research material and—what the fuck”

- Dr. Starky, ten minutes ago, emerging from and returning to a lengthy coma brought on by acute Sween overdose during his ill-fated Sween Week this past July.

Awesome Sween Week Graphics

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:39:00 -0400

Let it be known that the amazing Girlmonkey made these graphics for me. They are amazing. Look at them. Amazing. Did you look at them? Maybe look at them again. Then follow Girlmonkey on Twitter. Then look at them again. Print them out. Tape them to your mirrors.

(She’s a great writer, too.)

Thank you, Ms. Monkey. Thank you very much. My apologies for neglecting to mention this already.

SWEEN WEEK PART 2 JERKSTICKS (Sween week part 1) For...

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:34:00 -0400

SWEEN WEEK PART 2 JERKSTICKS

(Sween week part 1)

For today’s Sween “tweet” I have gone a little further back in time than I normally do, since I found the specimen so interesting. I am, you may have guessed, extremely fascinated with Sween’s Canadianousness. Canadia is a strange place into which I have very recently been barred entry, and so like a small child that is forbidden to explore his father’s underwear drawer¹ I am now obsessed with it. Since this “tweet” focuses so specifically on various Canadian things, I had to study it further. A deeper study was both disappointing and surprising.

First, about Canada Day. In the United States, we celebrate a similar holiday on the 4th of July² which denotes our flipping the righteous finger of freedom to our lame-ass parent kingdom (the United Kingdom).³ Canada Day instead recognizes when the United Kingdom decided to make Canada a real place rather than just the imaginary wonderland it had been prior to that, when it existed only in the dreams of depressed children and small dogs.

To say the very least, this is lame.

But Sween’s “tweet” instead makes a wonderful analogy. One that is far less lame and by extension far more non-lame because it doesn’t have anything at all to do with Canada Day. Which as I have said before is pretty lame.

In this “tweet,” the “maple syrup” denotes Canadian industry, “your eyes” represent the working man’s drive to convert hard work into Industry, and “Céline Dion”⁴ represents the heart-dashingly attractive but dangerously looming spectre of laziness that threatens to undermine the working man’s singular drive for greatness. Laziness, like Ms. Dion, is a Siren. Its beautiful cry burrows deep into a man’s heart. But take heed, Canadians! Place but a jar of the blood of your national industry at the window to stave off her keening wail of slothitude! Beautiful!

Yes, I’m crying, I admit it.

(source)

¹ What was in the drawer, you ask? Nothing. This is an analogy. If you are curious, my father did not have an underwear drawer because he did not wear underwear as he was part of a naturist commune in Vermont. While there he formed a three-piece band called The Junk Funkies. As dictated by naturist commune mores, he wore the guitar very high so his penis was still visible to the audience. The drummer was forced to play facing the rear of the stage. It was complicated.

² This holiday is referred to colloquially in various areas of the United States as “Splodin’ Day,” “Neck-Strainer’s Day of Delight,” “Fingerman’s Folly,” “The Night of a Thousand Yipping Frightened Dogs”, and “Habersham’s Sparklefest.”

³ King George IV (the reigning world champion of the United Kingdom) was nicknamed “The Rabbit” for his charming ability to procreate in only thirty-one days thereby producing an entire litter of cute and fuzzy royalty-kittens. From this the phrase “Silly Rabbit, Tricks are for Patriots”^a was born, a phrase still in modified use today amongst Alaskan teenagers who fight over easily-abused prescription drugs. (The “Rabbit” in this case is the child most likely to be a “Narc,” which is a hurtful nickname for the narcoleptics who so desperately needed the drugs—the “tricks”—to survive the long, dark Ice Wolf season. The “patriots” are the tougher, less sleep-deprived children.)

⁴ My favorite songstress!

^aThe “tricks” referred to in the original expression were a reference to fornication with a prostitute. If you read your American History books you’ll know why those prostitutes were so important. Ever heard of Betsy Ross, dumbass?

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sween week graphics are courtesy of girlmonkey, whom you should follow on twitter.

First, let me begin with a few personal notes: Many thanks to...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:18:00 -0400

First, let me begin with a few personal notes:

Many thanks to my wonderful teaching assistant Kip, who was a big help during my physical and emotional convalescence, especially when administering his world-class perineal massages, for covering this weblog for me while I was, you know, convalescing and getting my perineum tenderly knuckled.¹
Many thanks to everyone who left a comment or thought about leaving a comment (I know who you are, you kind souls!) on that last post that Kip left. I have been soaking up your healing mindthoughts like some sort of extra-large psychic Zorbeez™.²
Many thanks to Mr. Sween who has kindly given “Sween Week” his holy blessing.³

Thank you for indulging an old man’s fancies.

SWEEN WEEK, MFERS

So I’m kicking off Sween Week⁴ with this gem of a “tweet”. Let us pick this “tweet” apart like the glorious odoriferous onionoid it appears to be.

This “tweet” exemplifies Sween’s (perhaps fictional) existence as a tortured man-child⁵. In this “tweet”, Sween lies awake at night pondering horrificalities until he spirals downward into a mental pit of anguish inside which no light can exist and where sleep is impotent to save one from the madness that grows in ones own brain, which is a common theme he returns to often in his “tweets”. This is why so many people think he is so funny, unlike sad clowns or every other Canadian. In this case he is abusing his imagination privileges by considering the Omega Supervillain.

The humor of this “tweet” derives from the fact that everyone knows that the Omega Supervillain is in fact 1983 Soviet Russia. Sween subverts this universal expectation and instead creates humor through a surprising amalgam of several supervillains from popular works of fiction:

“Lord” clearly refers to Jesus;
“Adolf” is a pointed reference to Austrian footballer Adolf Hütter against whom Sween appears to be harboring some sort of hateful grudge because he, unlike Jesus, is clearly non-fictional;
and “Skeletortron” which is a clever portmanteau of He-Man nemesis⁶Skeletor and the optical scanning systems created by the Scantron corporation for recording pencil marks on specially formatted sheets of paper.

It is the third of these that holds the most promise for further study, for obvious reasons.

Does Sween hate the Scantron corporation itself or its product? After all, such bubble-sheet multiple-choice apparati appear in several places:

In schools, for standardized testing, which I assume they have in Canada but I wouldn’t know because they wouldn’t let me in;
In many voting districts in the United States during federal, state and local elections;
And for communicating with deaf-mute people over great distances.

It is difficult to know what Sween intends with this “tweet”, then. Does he mean to disparage the very few communication methods available to the deaf-mute? Does he hate the processes by which he was able to excel in school, which I have been told by many reliable sources⁷ he most certainly did? Is he unhappy with the recent election returns in Canada, where I assume some sort of duck or moose has been elected to office?⁸ I leave this to the reader. I personally suspect that he was passed over for a job at Scantron, probably as one of their sophisticated sheet-readers, and he is now greatly embittered by this. Adolf Hütter probably works there, too.

(source)

¹ He’s very versatile.

² That’s right, I said Zorbeez™. Look ‘em up.^a ShamWOWs are for suckers and dilettantes.

³ He replied to my email! I’m never washing this computer again!

⁴ Which by the way will not just be one week and will not happen every day unless for some reason it is and it does.

⁵ Much like Michael Jackson! Can you believe it! I referenced both of the dead people! (See footnote ^a)

⁶ And occasional reluctant swing dance partner

⁷ Classmates.com

⁸ Just kidding. Lighten up, Canada.

^aRIP Billy Mays, whom you might be surprised to learn was a quite a significant supporter of my research. I don’t know what I’d do if he had not generously doubled that offer of Mighty Putty™. (FOR FREE! Not including a reasonable shipping and handlement surcharge. Mighty Putty™ is a class 2 explosive and is very difficult to ship.)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sween week graphics are courtesy of girlmonkey, whom you should follow on twitter.

Returning Very Soon

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:36:00 -0400

Kip here again. The Prof is finally starting to feel better. His skin is healing nicely from all of the road rash he suffered during his Canadian border-crossing disaster from a few weeks ago, and he’s excited to get his research going again. He’s afraid everybody stopped reading this a long time ago. It’s not actually true; we’re down to about fifteen “tumblr followers” again, which any mathematician will tell you is WAY bigger than zero. Like CRAZY bigger than zero.

Would you fifteen guys mind writing the Professor a note or a card or something asking him to come back? The University doesn’t let him get mail anymore (after the whole incident with that “lady”) so you’ll just have to pretend to send it to him, like you would with letters to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Ghost of President Hoover. But just like those fictional monsters, the very much non-fictional Professor will be able to feel the good feelings rising from your cards and notes like cartoon stink-lines of karma tragicomically entering his giant inhaling karmanose. Thank you so much.

Sween Week Has Been Postponed

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:49:00 -0400

Kip here. Well, so Prof. Starky was going to do Sween week this week, but all sorts of things have gotten in the way.

There was a little problem with some unpaid parking tickets that got Prof. Starky’s car towed.
Locusts! Locusts! Locusts!
The Canada Incident.

So, okay, he told me not to tell you about The Canada Incident but I guess I had better or you guys will email him and pester him and he really needs time to recover now that he’s finally back in the United States.

So, Sween is from Canada, right? Well, Prof. Starky has mentioned before that he finds Canada unsettling, but he was determined to get some good research done on Mr. Sween and so he figured he needed to observe him in his native habitat. But Prof. Starky had lost his car to the fascist regime of the Washington University Parking Enforcement and so he had no way to get to or get across the border. I ride a nice little scooter around everywhere, but no way was I going to let the Professor have that.

Well, turns out that I know a guy who knows a guy who has a big crazy panel van who goes across the border all the time. So the Professor decided to stow away in the back of the panel van—I guess I’m not clear on why he had to be smuggled across the border, but apparently the last time he was in Canada the Professor was a much younger, hornier, breakinger-and-enteringer man—with his economical, off-brand, three-speed bicycle. When they made it to the border, the Professor threw open the doors of the panel van and shot out of the back astride his bicycle, a maneuver which he practiced for three days in the parking lot to which he was so recently granted access (THANKS EVERYONE FOR SIGNING THE PETITION), but he mistimed his emergence in two ways:

He was still in the United States by about five hundred yards AND
The panel van was moving at about eighty-five miles per hour.

The details get hazy after that. He’s back home now, and I’m taking care of him, though if he rings that fucking little bell I gave him to summon me one more time just to massage his scrotum again, I swear to god I am going to join the Peace Corps.

Sween Week. It’s coming. Soon. Soon-ish. (Awesome...

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:13:30 -0400

Sween Week. It’s coming. Soon. Soon-ish.

(Awesome photoshop work by Traci AKA @girlmonkey. For her excellent work, by the way, she was compensated with twelve credit hours toward the degree of her choice at Washington Polytech here in Indianapolis.)

I Have Got To Get It Together, People

Sun, 24 May 2009 21:49:00 -0400

Guys. Guys. Look. C’mere. Guys. Look.

I need to tell you something.

The “tweets,” guys. You know. The “tweets”? My research? Something’s wrong.

All the “tweets” seem obvious, now. It’s like a switch was flipped, and now all the “tweets” seem normal and obvious and there’s no deeper truths and onionic layerings and subtle double switch-backs like I’m used to seeing everywhere.

Something happened in Pittsburgh. Something happened to me in Pittsburgh.

Before Pittsburgh there was beauty and truth and social networtainment.

After Pittsburgh every tweet reads like one of Guy Kawasaki’s interns pecked it into a Blackberry with his pointy, needle-like beak while the smoothest of jazz played in the background, muffling the sound of his master’s painful death wheezes.¹

So now I’m locked in the bathroom of my apartment with my MacBook siphoning² WiFi from my downstairs neighbors³ while Kip bangs on the door and tries to reason with me.⁴

I keep looking, over and over, at the last two weeks of “tweets” and I just don’t understand what happened. Was it all the smoke I inhaled at the Twootenanny? Was it the head injury I suffered in the rest area bathroom on I-79 that I have successfully concealed from Kip until he reads this?⁵ Was it the fifth ibuprofen I accidentally took for the resultant headache? I know you’re only supposed to take four at a time, but I was having trouble counting and I didn’t even notice until Kip did my end-of-trip travel inventory and debriefing three days later.

But that doesn’t matter. Everything’s falling apart. My research. The book deal based on my research. The fancy over-sized I-told-you-so card I made for my ex-wife that says, “Guess what, Jerk-Lady, I got a book deal based on my research.” It’s all falling apart.

Well, it’s a real pickle, but ol’ Professor Starky has dealt with worse problems.⁶ I’m going to spend the next week meditating, which seemed to work before.

I guess I’ll let Kip into the bathroom now.

¹ “For while Twitter lives he shall never die; and while he lives so too will Twitter always; and in this way the two are linked forever, lo though he may live unto a thousand years and/or a million followers, whichever shall come first.”^a

² Because Kip already turned off my apartment’s WiFi so that I couldn’t go online and post something “stupid.”

³ SSID: I Peed On Your Car. They’re not nice people.

⁴ He thinks I have sleeping pills in here, but I let that prescription lapse three years ago when I realized I could get the same drowsing effect with an Oreo cookie, a moment of quiet self-reflection, and a bag of popcorn popping in the microwave. Two or three bags and I’m out like a light.^b

⁵ That’s right, Kip, I didn’t fall into a puddle of ketchup like I told you. I’m sorry. I hope you learn to trust me again someday.

⁶ I’m having trouble thinking of one at the moment.

^a From the Book of Guy, in some fake Twitter Bible I just made up. Holy shit, I’m getting my lit agent on the phone right now. This dude is so easy to make fun of. ^α

^b A light that doesn’t have a dimmer switch, or a clapper. Just a switch. But not one of those old fashioned ones; they make too much noise. When I go to sleep it’s soundless and beautiful, like a Yugo exploding in space.

^α I wonder if he’ll write the intro.

"Twootenanny" Post-Mortem

Sun, 17 May 2009 22:39:41 -0400

Kip here. Prof. Starky just got back from the “Twootenanny” in Pittsburgh. He made many great observations of the “tweeters” in their natural habitat from an airduct near where many of the “tweeters” were sitting. Let me share some of his notes with you:

They hand out paper hearts and stars to one another in person, which is interesting. Some of them seem very eager to get the stars, though none of them actually ate the stars themselves. I assume that when they went to the bathroom they ate them or stuffed them into their cheek-pouches.
As on Twitter itself, they seem to worship bacon like a god, distributing many bacon-related items amongst them. I grow ever more concerned for the inclusiveness of Twitter for people who do not eat bacon, because even Jewish, Muslim and Mormon people deserve the joy of “tweeting.”
Did you know you can still smoke in the bars in Pittsburgh? It’s like a fucking third-world country here.

The rest of the notes are pretty blurry, and Prof. Starky is in no condition to explain them to me because apparently he was observing the party from an air duct nearby and all of the smoke inhalation has made him pretty incoherent. Still, a pretty good first attempt at in situ “tweeter” research, I think.

texburgher: TWOOTENANNY!Thanks @dascola for designing this...

Fri, 15 May 2009 21:38:24 -0400

texburgher:

TWOOTENANNY!

Thanks @dascola for designing this kickass poster.

I’m looking forward to studying many “tweeters” in person this weekend at the Pittsburgh “Twootenanny” though I will be hidden behind an apparatus of my own design that is not unlike a duck blind.

Today’s research focuses on a second “tweet”...

Tue, 12 May 2009 11:08:00 -0400

Today’s research focuses on a second “tweet” from Ms. Genine (previous).

But first, let me tell you something. My loyal TA of the past twelve years, Kip Gerhardt, is also a good friend of mine. So when he called me up this past weekend and asked me to help him build a deck in his backyard, I dropped what I was doing¹ and I headed right over on my off-brand economical three-speed bicycle.² I guess I’m a little absent-minded, because I didn’t even notice that it was eleven o’clock at night and Kip told me he’d recently moved to an address that Google Maps informed me was being shared by a local business that caters in the viewing of the feminine art of fireman’s gymnastics.³ When I arrived I was quite surprised, as it turned out that Saturday was also my seventy-fifth birthday. I will leave the rest to your imagination.⁴

I found it particularly interesting, then, that this particular “tweet” appeared only one day prior.⁵ And as I reflected on the nature of the groupie mentioned while staring into the (thankfully) blue, disinfected waters of my toilet early Sunday morning I realized that Ms. Genine was correct. There is a striking community among many “tweeters” on Twitter and a verbalization of that fact in such an earnest way was touching and underscores many of the very post-human trending patterns that I am attempting to study here.⁶

But perhaps further delvations into the deeper meaning of the term “groupies” is warranted. Interestingly, while some popular rock-and-roll musicians—the very people with whom groupies are normally associated—do appear on Twitter their “tweets” seem mostly focused on the velocity and frequency of the roll-over events of their kitty-cats, so of course I do not take this “tweet” literally.

Therefore I am forced to assume that instead the author refers to the underground clubs, or “groups” (members of which are idiosyncratically called “groupies”) where like-minded individuals get together to register their displeasure with the quality and consistency of their municipal water supply via letter-writing campaigns. Any subsequent reference to “animal stacking”⁷ would solidify my suspicions vis-a-vis her involvement in such groups. Luckily these groups have a largely negligible if slightly beneficial effect on society, and occasionally a member will produce a memoir of such surprising insight and poignancy⁸ that I encourage such participation in my undergraduate students.

(source)

¹ Puzzle number 87 in a book titled Easy, Breezy, Summer-Fun Crossword Puzzles for Hip and With-It Tweens. Even though I am quite acute in the area I am attempting to bolster further my knowledge of popular culture. I got stuck on 10 “acrozz” for a good twenty minutes.^a

² She’s green and I named her Bikey Saint L’Orange which makes more sense when you find out that I’m colorblind.

³The Indianapo-Loose 500 Sexy Ladies is its name though it appears to overestimate the number of ladies employed there by at least a factor of two.

⁴ Imagination seed-word: “breast.”

⁵ Please do not cast aspersions on the character of Ms. Genine by implying that she has been monitoring my whereabouts and then employing a time machine to pre-“tweet” my activities. This would be highly unlike her, as far as I can tell.

⁶ Kip’s take on this “tweet”: “Sounds like a lot of fuckin’ and suckin’.” By now it should be obvious that Kip is a coarse, uncouth man-child.^b

⁷ Street slang for the multi-stage water filtration process developed by Animal Stackers, Inc, which was founded by Arthur “Animal” Stackers in 1912. (The nickname came from his mom.)

⁸A River Runs Through It is but one example.

^a Turns out it was “zacefron,” whatever the hoot that is. Some kind of plant?

^b Kip is also convinced that this “tweet” indicates that Ms. Genine has documentation related to the, according to Kip, “probably insane amount of Twitter scrunch that Sween is getting,” though I asked him to please not elaborate.

I chose this “tweet” for today’s research due...

Thu, 07 May 2009 11:00:00 -0400

I chose this “tweet” for today’s research due to its clear references to popular culture, because it seems that for my previous research many people accused me of being tone-deaf to the popular culture reference embedded within the referenced “tweet.” However, these people continuously refer to something called “The Humpty Dance” and my research shows no rhythmic gyration associated with the Humpty Dumpty myth, therefore I am forced to conclude that these people are in a common miscreant gang or on drugs of some sort.¹

Or maybe both. Because that is the crux of today’s subject “tweet,” is it not? Witness it cleverly making allusions to Marie Antoinette’s famous apocryphal crypto-aphorism, “Let them eat cake but they cannot have it also.”² The author of today’s “tweet” makes a similar statement regarding the simultaneous having and the eating, except this time the having is a banana in one’s pocket and the eating is an erect penis.³

Despite the vulgar tones (for which I am sorry if they have offended you, but I am a Professor and I can talk to you about these things without having previously received a note from your mother⁴) I am encouraged by this “tweet” because of its relentlessly optimistic nature⁵ and by its flagrant lack of references to Objectivism.⁶

Anyway, I hope this quiets all of the people who claim that I am nose-blind to popular culture references. You people are starting to make me regret that I enabled comments on this weblog.⁷

(source)

¹ Drugs are also known to rob a user of his or her sense of humor, making it impossible for them to detect intentional oversight and I know this because of the one time I took a narcotic known colloquially amongst the Native Northern Indianans (near Gary) as “warm milk duds(tm)” and proceeded to misunderstand hours and hours of jokes where they pointedly ignored their squalid living conditions.

² This is actually a bastardization of her original statement, which was quite wordy and read thusly (translated from the original Danish):

“Let them eat cake and shit. Whatever. Jesus. They want to have it, too? What the fuck? I just said they could eat it. What, they want to put the cake on a shelf? Save it for future generations or some shit? Maybe I should just eat it, what do you think about that, motherfucker?”

³ The cake is just cake. John Moltz is well-known to love cake.⁸

⁴ Though I’ve gotten a lot more than that from your mother. High-five?

⁵ and lately ol’ Professor Starky doesn’t have much to be thankful for except his still-youthful ability to find bananas in his pockets at odd hours and with little forewarning.

⁶ Because it seems like every other “tweet” is someone closing their eyes and thrusting wildly with their tongue, which they personally and privately nicknamed “The Prime Mover,” hoping to encounter Ayn Rand’s “Meta-Normative, Selfish And Rational Ladyparts qua Ladyparts.”

⁷ No, I’m kidding, all discourse is great, especially when I get to write whatever I want here and all you get to do is complain in some stupid comments that I’ll probably never read again.

⁸ I’m not going to look up everything for you. Maybe the first thing you should look up is what the acronym WATB stands for. Because that’s what you are. You are a TB that has a WA.

First of all, let me say that I’m sorry I’ve been...

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:58:40 -0400

First of all, let me say that I’m sorry I’ve been gone for so long. Kip says that I should change the subtitle of this weblog to read “Weekly” instead of “Daily” but Kip’s the same guy who said I should buy an MP3 player from Dell and who still wears a ratty Led Zeppelin t-shirt to all of his office hours so his judgement in some matters is worthless and in most others very questionable.

However, the question is raised: am I going to post here daily? No. This is intentional. I am using a B.F. Skinner-inspired schedule of variable ratio reinforcement to keep my readers motivated (some might say “addicted,” but such troglogisms do not come from the mouths of those educated here at Washington Polytech). If I can foster a dependence on my research then my readers are much more likely to buy my book when it comes out sometime in 2010.¹

Anyway. Today’s “tweet” is very interesting. Quite short,² but offering much in the way of depth and nuance that I have come to expect from many of you out in the “Tweetosphere.”

At first glance, like many “tweets,” is a simple, humorous personal anecdote by the author, Mr. Brother. The ironic juxtaposition of “[laziness]” and “Burger King” is particularly jocular as the fast food establishment is well known for the hard work it inspires in its employees, and also in its patrons.³ I am assuming that at one time or another Mr. Brother enjoyed a meal at one of these eateries, or perhaps was an employee there—either way, the occasion to use the bathroom certainly presents itself.⁴

On one level, Mr. Brother is merely engaging in a personal boast: that the one time he experienced laziness in the bathroom of a Burger King is noteworthy implies a distinct lack of laziness in his everyday life. This researcher has nothing but Kudös for such an assertion.

What else could Mr. Brother intend from this “tweet?” References to laziness, especially with regard to a commercial enterprise, always raise the Objectivist hackles on the back of my neck.⁶ But I don’t think that is the aim here; in fact, I think the opposite. This “tweet” is a proletariat call to arms.

“Solidarity, my Burger King brethren and sistren! Let us break free of the soul-deadening brain-shackles of the Capitalist King of Burgers! A work slowdown via bathroom laziness will crush the master plan he has conceived in his creepy, horribly scarred and genetically unlikely over-sized novelty head!”⁷

Such populist rabble-“tweeting” didn’t work for Mr. Marx⁸ and it won’t work for you, Mr. Brother.⁹ I’ve got my eyes on you.

(source)

¹ One of the problems with my book is that I don’t have the rights to use anyone’s “tweets” that I’m researching, but I’m planning on just using 5% of each one (up to seven characters) and then claiming “fair use” or “yahtzee!” or “game over” or whatever, I’m not a lawyer.

² 5% Fair use version of this “tweet:” “I “

³ Especially in the “bathroom.”

⁴ I find no reason to doubt, therefore, the accuracy or veracity of the “tweet” itself—no reason to suspect it as some sort of wistful yarn spun forth from the mind of a burger aficionado who has been banned, for some ineffable reason, from appearing within 50 yards of a swift-serve foodhut, which I have heard can happen the very first time you emerge pantless from the bathroom while bellowing some variation on the phrase, “To fight the horde and sing and cry, ‘Valhalla, I am coming!’”⁵

⁵ This story may be apocryphal, as its source is somewhat untrustworthy (as previously mentioned).

⁶ As opposed to my Objectivist testicular hackles, which are raised whenever I glance upon the portrait of Mrs. Rand held firmly in my left hand while my right hand attempts to start a fire by feverishly rubbing the two folded halves of a one dollar bill together.

⁷ That this call is emitted over a free, public-access social network is not lost on this researcher. No, sir. No way. Uh-uh.

⁸ @socialism_FTW, but the account has been suspended due to spamming.

⁹ If that is your real name. I have no reason to suspect otherwise.

In 1998, I flew to Las Vegas for a conference on the societal...

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:35:00 -0400

In 1998, I flew to Las Vegas for a conference on the societal impact of human bonds formed over a series of one-way sociohumanistic interfacings transmitted through a diginetwork between individuals who might be situated tens or even dozens of miles away from each other, and who might never meet in person.¹

I gave the keynote address on the first day of the conference² and afterwards I was exhausted. I used to get so nervous at these things! In 2001 I discovered that eating a Denny’s Moons Over My Hammy in as few bites as possible³ right before going on stage almost completely cured me of my stage fright and therefore I have not since had any problems except for that one time I had to do some impromptu extemporaneous speaking at a flash mob in Hoboken.⁴

Anyway: Las Vegas. Exhausted. Dehydrated. Feverish. (I had picked something up from Kip’s preschool-aged jerkburger of a kid a few days beforehand when Kip brought her into our office and let her lick the space bar on my fancy Danish keyboard.) I went to my hotel room and collapsed on my bed, spinning into a wild, sweaty fever dream, like the ones people have in television westerns when they hallucinate all sorts of horrible beasts of foreshadowing.⁵

In that dream I saw a vision of the very social networking toolplications we have today. I saw them explode out before me, making connections between people our primitive PornoCon ‘98 could never have imagined, and did not imagine until at least PornoCon ‘99. Millions of people, barking out short statements that turned into winged ponies that split apart and alighted into many other peoples’ ponihuts. Porn ponies that shook uncontrollably. Joke ponies that laughed and pooped and laughed again. SEO ponies that furtively scratched at each other’s genitals. Other ponies that did other humorously exaggerated things.

I awoke and drew a picture of what I’d seen in my head, but unfortunately that picture was destroyed later by an overzealous hotel housekeeper.

Anyway, Scott Simpson’s “tweet” reminded me of that story because I found a big wad of hair under the bed the next morning. I guess his hotel room is pretty hairy, too, which (believe me) is really pretty gross.

(source)

¹IntrospectionCon ‘98 was a small section of a much larger convention called PornoCon ‘98 and was funded by public radio pornographers who were required by the FCC to support communobeneficial programming. This was groundbreaking in 1998.⁶

² “Sordid Antisocial Reputation Analysis Via Shortest-Chain Klaus-Lyman Counting of Adjacent Boner Matrices” and yes it was a HIT.

³ My research suggests that 3 is optimal.

⁴ That speech was entitled “Whuffie: Why You Want It And How You Aren’t Going To Get It By Taking My Television.” I speak better from notes.

⁵ For example, when Half-Pint had a fever in the first season of Little House on the Prarie and imagined she saw, hovering over the very fever-bed in which she thrashed with an oily rag on her forehead, a berzerker Merlin Olsen knocking down the set pieces in a bout of late onset ‘roid rage, it eerily presaged that very event in season five.

⁶ AOL Keyword PORNOCON

(Note: If you’re reading this via your tumblr...

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:08:00 -0400

(Note: If you’re reading this via your tumblr “dashboard,” you might wish to click through for additional images.)

An excellent “tweet” today. As you may know, I am infatuated with shorter “tweet” specimens as their ambiguity (and in some cases, near ineffability) provides far greater opportunity for the authors to hint at or deliver deeper truths.

However, today I have picked a longer “tweet” that seems upon first glance to be nothing more than a simple (but amusing) statement regarding man’s position simultaneously both above and among the “beasts of the field.” Indeed, comparing one’s abilities against those of the animal kingdom is both cheering and depressing, indicating that the definition of animals, the sum total of the very characteristics that make an animal an animal per se (nice teeth, glossy coat, cute little bunny ears, excellent ups¹) and not something else (like, say, a nice toaster²) is a sine qua non for defining humanity itself.

This point is excellently made, and if 95% of readers come away from this “tweet” with only this single thought, then I (and hopefully the author) will be quite pleased.

(Rabbits themselves are interesting to discuss in that they represent something of a paradox themselves: they are horrible little animals,³ but they are also proven to be nature’s least hatable creatures.⁴ No one knows why this is.)

But there is a deeper meaning worth pondering here: in our ever-more-interconnected world, when carrot-biting aficionados can easily gather in their own carroty corner of cyberspace, what does the author say about loneliness and misanthropism by comparing herself to a rabbit? Does the author mean to demonstrate a world where attempting to excel at anything (in this case, biting things) is so confused by the sheer number of ways in which people can be and are now compared that excellence itself is a bit of animal nature that we now transcend? And to what end??

All in all, quite a thought-provoking “tweet.” I look forward to further excellent thoughts from the author.

(source)

¹

A rabbit, in grass

²

Not a rabbit, in snow⁵

³ Mostly because you can’t trust one not to pee on you if you hold one in your lap for five minutes even if you are wearing nice pants, and don’t let it anywhere near your power cords because it’ll just chew right through those like they’re made out of rabbit candy without regard for whether your TiVo was in the middle of recording America’s Next Top Model, which is like the only thing that makes Wednesdays tolerable, and it knows you can’t do anything about it because it’s your wife’s rabbit and it knows somehow that you’re emotionally hamstrung by confrontation and have you read Watership Down?

⁴ You heard me, pandas.

⁵Photo by killbox.

Recently Twitterers have been making it difficult on ol’...

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:27:00 -0400

Recently Twitterers have been making it difficult on ol’ Keith. I’ve been having a hard time discerning anything deeper in many of their “tweets” and frankly I’m starting to worry that I’ve already lost my mojo. Late Friday night, as the sweaty waves of panic were beginning to ebb after reading “tweet” after “tweet,” all lacking deeper truths, I decided some intense personal reflection was required. I spent all weekend wrenched into a lotus position with my Blackberry—perpetually tweeping its low-battery tones like an injured harp seal—stashed just out of reach. I wore a Camelbak full of absinthe slung low over my naked torso as I pondered the words “what are you doing what are you doing whatareyoudoing wharyoodoon” over and over again while performing some heavy breathing exercises and lightly penciling on some Sudoku puzzles I printed out from a German website that uses nine different multistable Gestalt forms instead of numbers. (I took a bathroom break a few times, too; thanks much for your concern.)

(Side note: you may have noticed that I posted this weekend about the parking space; that was my TA, Kip Gerhardt, to whom I have given permission to occasionally post minor administrative notes on this weblog. From now on his involvement will be made more obvious. Sorry for the confusion. Also please continue to pass my parking form between you; thanks for that.)

I can’t really talk about what I discovered this weekend—not in words, anyway¹—but I came back to Twitter at three o’clock this morning with a new mind, a blank canvas upon which I will allow your “tweets” to paint a beautiful picture of hope, loneliness, passion, and despair.

The tweet I analyze today has done just that. Upon first glance this appears to be a humorous aside about the tribulations of raising a child in the 21st century. A deeper look is required.

The crux of the author’s meaning here is twofold: One, that all of us seek balance² in a world that constantly pummels us with commercial imagery³ just as the windshield of a speeding Ford Festiva in Florida is ubiquitously tattooed with cigarette butts and sun-bleached copies of Cat Fancy.

Two, that in our modern world of dashing Wall Street robber-barons we can suddenly find ourselves working merely for the entertainment of those who fancy themselves to be both our caretakers and our pickpockets. We perform tricks—flipping burgers, piloting airplanes, repairing absinthe-corroded Camelbaks—for their benefit and seemingly not for our own.

In such a place, can we truly be rewarded for hard work? Can the have-not-Milk-Bone underclass trust the have-Milk-Boners? Is it possible to find this “balance?”

Where is our Milk-Bone, you horrible men? Where is our Milk-Bone, Franklin-Covey Asset Management Fund? Where?? I guess I’m not retiring this year!

Thanks to Mr. Hopkins for this excellent “tweet.” It has given me much to think about, and raised my hopes for the future of the medium once again.

(source)

¹ I am working on a series of dance moves for this.

² Not an accidental turn of phrase.

³ Did you think that the use of a brand name baby treat here (Milk-Bone) was for comedic impact alone? You sell Mr. Hopkins short, sirs and madams.

Administrivia

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:45:14 -0400

So, somehow I’ve managed to get 300 tumblr “followers” for my research. This is really good news, and I’m pretty sure I’m a shoo-in for that parking space in the University annex lot. (Gaining a space there will reduce my commute time by 37%!) Just to seal the deal, I’m sending around a form for you all to sign, starting with my first follower (a very kind Mr. Weselec, which I guess is a Polish name) and working its way around to my last follower, a Mr. Remiel, whom I do not know but who seems pleasant enough. Just pass it on to the next person after you sign it, and maybe leave a little testimonial about how my research is benefiting your life, or the lives of your descendants, and if there’s still space after all of that you can draw a picture of a cat.

Please send it back to me when it is completed. Thank you.

I know. Sween. Again. Right? My email is already filling up....

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:29:19 -0400

I know. Sween. Again. Right? My email is already filling up. “Does Keith Starky have a research stiffy for Sween?” they all ask, using different words and foreign words and words that I can’t pronounce the same way twice in a row, like aaaaeeeeaaaaallbllbll. (But please, keep sending me your delightful emails. They are essential to my research.)

Yes. Keith Starky is research-gay for Sween. Okay?

I like short “tweets” the best. Any monkey with a typewriter, three or four monkey paws and a basic sense of direction can cram a lot of ideas into one hundred and forty characters. Look, I’ll show you.

The dichromatic exegesis of the alphabetic equinoid dead-ender doesn’t enumerate markings so much as disenumerate the spaces between them.¹

See that? You can say anything in a buck forty. Less than half that many characters and you’re going to need a few more monkeys and some sort of industrial idea cram-rod.

I guess what I’m saying is that Sween is at least three monkeys (give or take the cram-rod). Here. Take a look at this one. I’ll show you.

Now when you read this “tweet,” here’s where your brain is going:

Umlauts. Diacritic mark.
Looks like eyes. Ha ha ha.
Well, things that stare are scary, especially in Canadia where Sween is from.²
Waitaminute, things with umlauts look German.
Hitler!
Back up, what about the heavy metal band umlaut cliché?
Hïtlër?
You’re pathetic.

Forget all that. What does the diacritic mark mean? Something about vowel sounds. Forget all that, too. Does Sween look like someone who cares about vowel sounds?

Vowels that look back at you. Vowels. That look back. At you.

Maybe I’m making this too easy for you. Without vowels, can we have words? No.³ The vowels are necessary. When they stare back, Sween says, they force us to no longer take them for granted. They are essential, but Sween wants to ignore them… except when a word or two needs to be created. He turns the lights down far lower than necessary to appropriately set the mood and turns up the slightly below-average-tempo jams and you can’t see the diacritic in the dark, baby, but it’s still there.

So, is Sween is a misogynist who yearns for earlier days when vowels (a.k.a. women a.k.a. can I be any more obvious) hadn’t even the social standing to stare down a Canadian with a hanker on for some wordsmithery, evoking neither a Heebie nor a Jeebie? No. But, men: did he make you rethink your attitudes toward women? And women: did he avoid embarrassing you? These are not answerable questions.

¹ You heard me.

² You see two little pin-small black things jammin’ you in your peeporbs while you’re standin’ in the middle of downtown Whitehorse with a half-pint of Ben and Jerry’s wearin’ just one sock, a secondhand Planet Hollywood sleeveless tshirt, two hats and a pant? You run, mister, and I don’t care who you think you are.

³ The Welsh can. I hate them.

Comments

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:18:19 -0400

At readers’ request, I have added comments to this weblog.

I have not been doing my research on “tweets” for...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:20:00 -0400

I have not been doing my research on “tweets” for very long, but I must say that I have been richly rewarded thus far with amazing examples, each enriched with a depth of thought that far outweighs the simplicity belied by its minimal nature. Certainly simple “tweeters” exist, emitting stories that are nothing more than they purport to be:

My cat keeps trying to jump on the fridge. It’s really cute.
Baking cookies, yum yum yum OM NOM NOM yum yum NOM yum
My cat totally missed the fridge! LOL FAIL
EATIN SUM CHIPS AS USALLY
Guys, my cat’s not moving. Hey, is that blood?

There is nothing wrong with “tweets” like these, nor with the “tweeters” who invent, manufacture and distribute them. And I admit that when the idea of Twitter first graced my hearing aids I was convinced that this would be all I found here.

Instead, I see beautiful “tweets” like this one by Mr. Lisagor and my heart thumps melodic.

I find myself being forced to admit that this particular “tweet” did not at first glace appear to contain anything worth discussing in my research. But there was… something… about it. Something that made me return to it again and again today, my breath quickened at each return. I knew there must be something there.

Was it coincidence that this “tweet” was conceived on the day on which Americans’ income taxes are due? No, it could not have been.

I posit that Mr. Lisagor is a lapsing Objectivist who feels lost in the contemporary sociopoleconomic upheaval. Because what can “your own moisture” be but the sweat of your brow, created by the hard work that creative, industrious men like Mr. Lisagor do every day?¹ As they stand in long lines at the post office, wincing with each belabored step, pretending not to be offended by the Socialist stench of government “enterprise” (that rises above the noble aroma of the late-filer), the Objectivist knows the fruits of his labor are being syphoned away to buy crackpipes for homeless immigrants.²

But the author is confused and troubled. “Does it count?” he asks. The author wonders if, in a world of creeping neo-neo-socialism born from the ashes of an economic disaster brought on by circa laissez-faire policies and “selfish virtue,” is there any place left for an Objectivist? On a day when a clarion paean to Reason would resonate most obviously, the author steps back and doubts himself.

On the one hand, did our policies go too far in allowing financial institutions to pillage the economy, like a fat person animatedly dancing too close to the edge of the stage? Or, on the other hand, did we not go far enough? Isn’t it possible that that fat person, stumbling over the edge of the stage in a jitterbuggian rapture-seizure, might grow beautiful faerie wings and fly away? Isn’t it??

Beautiful.

Also, did you notice that “lonelysandwich” is an anagram for Halcyon Swindle? Well, I totally did.³ Whether the Halcyon Swindle refers to the election of President Obama or the ultimate death pangs of the Objectivist movement is irrelevant.

(source)

¹ And Mr. Lisagor is indeed a capitalist, having recently released an iPhone application for Twitter called “Birdhouse”⁴ that I have found incredibly useful for my research. But still, seeing that his application has been well-received just before the day on which he is reminded how little of his hard work’s reward will flow into his pockets? An Objectivist would emit real tears—tears that he would then capture in a non-recyclable bottle to be resold on eBay.

² See Ayn Rand’s poem “A Crackpipe Steals Away The Very Breath Of The Stoic American Inventor God” from her rare book of poems A Poem Is A Poem.

³ Checkmate, bitches!

⁴ Mr. Lisagor’s “Birdhouse” partner Mr. Hunt was extraordinarily helpful in identifying and remedying a flaw in this website’s stylesheet and for that I am quite grateful.