Tweet, Tweet.

Today I'm going to talk about (quickly checks against old articles for the same subject) Twitter.

When I first heard of Twitter, I was totally neutral on it, mostly because I only heard of it in the vaguest sort of way. When I heard about the length limit, I rolled my eyes, because it sounded kind of dumb.

Then I thought about it some more, and realized that Twitter is for the terminally attention span-deprived. And I thought to myself, "Not for me."

It doesn't even have anything to do with the fact that it's for the cell phone crazy people who carry around cell phones and are constantly using them (I hate cell phones on general principle). It's just because, unlike a lot of people, I have an attention span, and "tweeting" sounds like it'd be annoying.

That, and anything with "twit" encapsulated in its name can't be good for your intellect.

But the real thing that makes me truly and deeply hate Twitter (at the moment) is that it's somehow so insanely popular (read "well-sponsored" or "made friends in the right circles") that on the news, which is usually horribly annoying on a good day, they mention Twitter every fifteen seconds and talk about how useful, awesome, and cool it is to use Twitter for this inane thing or that inane thing. There was even something on the local news about using Twitter to lose weight.

It figures something evil would come of something named after bird talk.

-Signing off.

And When You Least Expect It...

...nature strikes.

"See, Cousin Bess! see, ‘Duke, the pigeon-roosts of the south have broken up! They are growing more thick every instant, Here is a flock that the eye cannot see the end of. There is food enough in it to keep the army of Xerxes for a month, and feathers enough to make beds for the whole country. Xerxes, Mr. Edwards, was a Grecian king, who— no, he was a Turk, or a Persian, who wanted to conquer Greece, just the same as these rascals will overrun our wheat fields, when they come back in the fall..."

(From James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers.)

You might be wondering why I have this little quote about passenger pigeons. That's quite simple: I was strongly reminded of them early this afternoon.

You see, there are often large flocks of birds where I live (northwestern Ohio, near the Lake Erie shore). Birds like it here (although not in my backyard, as we harbor many cats).

Today, I saw the biggest freaking flock of birds I have ever seen.

It was no passenger pigeon sun-blotting swarm, but it was a pretty big flock. Out of every window which we looked while they dimmed the skies, there were easily hundreds of them, sitting, making brief flights, and chirping incessantly. (Our cats were busy at the daily meal we give them; they were so intent on the dead food they didn't notice this flock.)

Then, they all took off at once, and those of us who briefly stepped outside counted ourselves lucky that multiple stains in numerous colors of bird excrement didn't suddenly appear on us. It was a borderline miracle.

I love nature, but I hate birds.

-Signing off.