BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Hi.

My name is Murv, and I’m a “Twitterer”… Or a Tweep… Or Tweeple… Or Twipple… Or, maybe just a Twit. Who the hell really knows? I’ve seen so many monikers applied to folks who spend time on Twitter, that I’m pretty much lost. All I can really say is that you’ll notice that I didn’t say I was a Twitterholic. Because I’m not. Recovering or otherwise.

Yes, I do have an account on Twitter, and I do have a tendency to use it. Primarily I do this for purpose of alerting folks to new blog entries… In fact, there’s probably a Tweet floating around out in the ether about this very blog post. How weird is that? But, my point is, I really just use it to update folks about really important crap. Like the aforementioned blog post thing… Fiery balls of molten rock falling from the sky… Whether or not I am out of Braunschweiger… Whether or not to call 9-1-1 when E K is beating me… Like I said… Important crap.

But, yeah. I spend a little time there. And, since I do that, I also follow some folks too. I mean, hey, why play follow the leader if you’re always the leader. It gets a little boring. Sometimes it’s nice to follow someone else for a change.

However, this is where I started noticing things about “Twitter People”…

First off… There are definitely some -aholic’s out there. How do I know this? When I check my page in the evening and there are 487 tweets from @MisterSpankMe or some such… This is on the heels of 1792 tweets from him throughout the day. Okay, so he’s a little busy… But then, when I check it in the morning while having coffee, I log in to find another 3653 tweets from, yeah, you guessed it – @MisterSpankMe… Apparently his “Mistress” is into torture by sleep deprivation, because the dude hasn’t yet been to sleep. What’s more, he’s still tweeting his little heart out. In fact, 15 more tweets show up within the span of time I type “Good Morning All” and hit send.

Well…Actually I never type “Good Morning All”… That’s a little too generic for me. I like to greet the day with something amusing. Usually about coffee. You know, things like:

And when my hand opened the third seal, I heard the bean say come and see. I beheld and lo a black liquid; the name of which was Coffee…

Or…

Coffee is great, coffee is good, let us thank it for our mood…

But then, you all know I can only be serious when A) Writing a book or B) Ummm… Well… I can’t really get into that here…

Still, ya’know, if being a Twitterholic is your thing, more power to you… BTW, I should take this opportunity to point out that I made up  the ID @MisterSpankMe for the purposes of this blog post. If there is someone out there who actually goes by this handle, well, I neither follow him, nor is he following me, so no harm no foul. It’s all kind of one of those “names were changed to protect the addicted” sort of things…

But, this tiny, pale blue bird thing is not all that I’ve noticed. You see, a lot of these folks “follow chickens” even more than me. Yeah… I think maybe they have Twitter Attention Deficit Disorder – or as we like to call it here in the lab, TADD… You know, as in, “@MisterSpankMe is a TADD bit off his game today…” or “That was just a TADD silly, don’t you think, @SillyBastard?” (Yeah, I made up @SillyBastard too. Same disclaimer applies.)

So, anyway, this TADD thing… Those of you who have had any sort of brush with Twitterpation are probably aware of the “@ reply” tag. For those of you who aren’t, it is a process by which you direct your tweet at someone. Yes, you can do a private message, but if you just want to make a comment to someone publicly, as you would at say, a crowded party, you just put an @ symbol followed by the persons handle, then type the message.

I bring this up because I think the @ symbol may well be the source of the infection. You see, folks end up with so many @ replies flying across their screens, all interspersed with the plethora of tweets from @MisterSpankMe, that they end up following a whole coop full of chickens at once.

I’ve only a small amount of experience with it myself, but it seems almost like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time, all while Caleigh dancing, chewing gum, and threading a needle.

Kind of like the epitome of TMI… You just can’t keep up.

Oh well… Maybe it’s just because I’m too old. It could be that this whole Twitter thing is really meant for the youngsters. I guess I’ll stick to my coffee commentaries and blog posts…

Now, if you’ll be so kind to excuse me, @GibsonGirl is @tweeting me about @Framistat posting to #wingnuts #monkeybrains via tweetberry, and she wants me to look at tinyurl/XiPL&/WoyQ because twitterpic is down. And, of all things this is going on while @SkippyHead and @CaptainObvious are adding her to #followfriday and sending me a direct message about it… Can you imangine?

All I know is that I really don’t want to miss my chance to @LOL before the screen is full.

More to come…

Murv

Note: All @names in this post are intended as fictional handles, and are the product of my incredibly warped brain. If someone out there actually uses one of these, well, sorry about that. Fellow “Twits” can follow me at twitter.com/mrsellars. Just try not to follow too closely. I make frequent stops and wide right turns.

If you have been following me on Facebook in recent months, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I posted a whole slew of pictures from my high school years. This was brought about by the fact that I happened to stumble across a Facebook Group devoted to KRSH FM 90.1, (Now KRHS FM) the school radio station where I cut my teeth on broadcast media and moreover real, hardcore Journalism, at the direction of a fantastic teacher and faculty advisor, Martha Ackmann. But, I’ll babble on about that in a different blog. (Yeah, just gotta love chasing those chickens, eh?)… You see, the only reason I even brought that up is that it ties in with the fact that I was an avid photographer as well and I worked for the school newspaper and yearbook in that capacity… But, now we are running after a rooster… The deal is, I actually made myself a side business out of photography in the early to mid 90’s.

E K and I were partners with some other folks in a Saint Louis based sound recording studio… Yeah, yeah, I know… What does sound recording have to do with photography? Well, actually that’s an easy question to answer. Recording studios draw in bands; bands need publicity photos and CD artwork. See where I’m going? Yeah, it just sort of made sense… Therefore, we came up with the idea that having it all under one roof just might work. So, I dusted off and reassembled my darkroom, invested in a bit of updated equipment… Well, it was updated back then. Now, not so much. But, I digress… Anyway, back to the story, toss in setting up a couple of wholesale accounts for supplies, and there you go. We had ourselves a part-time photography business.

Well, the story behind the studio and how it eventually fell into financial ruin is a blog unto itself, which in order to protect the innocent will probably never see paper, electronic or otherwise. Suffice it to say, we had ourselves a good run while it lasted, and we actually did quite a few unique, fun, and even at times profitable, photo sessions in conjunction with recording sessions, bands, and even their groupies.

But, here’s the thing… I had pretty much pushed a lot of that completely to the back of my mind. I honestly hadn’t remembered how many shoots we had done until the other day when I was searching out pictures to scan for the whole KRSH thing I mentioned earlier. The whole mess came flooding back to the forefront when I found myself sifting through a 4-drawer file cabinet full of contact sheets, stripped proofs for publicity photos, and tons of negatives.

Yeah, a lot of pictures, both printed and unprinted… Fortunately, they were organized and labeled, which is obviously something I did back before I returned to my natural state of “messy desk habitat”…

Now, just to be annoying, I’m going to switch gears on you. Chase a different feathered fowl so to speak… Trust me, the rooster and the chicken eventually meet up and make cute little yellow chicks. Just give the egg a minute or two so it can hatch… I promise, it really will…

Some of you may remember from the “Mahwage” series of blog entries that I had mentioned E K being on the drill team when she was in high school. Well, because of that I have a tendency to refer to her as having been a cheerleader, to which she always replies, “I wasn’t a cheerleader, I was on the drill team.” It’s not that she has anything against cheerleaders… She just likes to clarify things.  She’s very direct like that… And, she’s evil… Anyway, it would seem that at her school at least, there was a hierarchy. Cheerleaders first, followed several rungs down the ladder by the Drill Team. Kind of a “cool kid caste system”… Okay, I’ll give you that… We had our own “caste system” when I was in high school, and I was right near the bottom of it… Actually, I don’t think I even qualified to even be on it… I think I was on the waiting list to get on the last line of the caste list, or something like that… So, what I am saying is that I get it. Cheerleaders were apparently “cooler” than the girls on the drill team.

Still, when you get right down to it, E K was way up on the ladder in relation to where I was. If I can use my high school experiences as a benchmark, she was in the top 5% of coolness, whereas I was overheated in hell. And, by the same token, the young ladies on the drill team wore uniforms… And, what were those uniforms? Fuzzy sweaters, really short skirts, and saddle oxfords… Or, those little mini-dress looking things in the summer… Anyway,  I rest my case.  The simple fact is, to a zit-faced outcast nerd like myself, if it looked like a cheerleader, wore clothes like a cheerleader, and bounced around like a cheerleader, then it was a cheerleader… And, of course, was therefore the object of many an adolescent fantasy.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be pornographic here… I’m just telling it like it is. But, since pornography has been mentioned, anyone with two brain cells in their head can look at popular media references and see that the whole cheerleader fantasy extends to the adult male as well. Therefore, I really and truly am making an objective observation here…

So, my initial point being this… I may have been a zit-faced nerd in high school, but I married myself a smokin’ hot cheerleader, so bite me! Neener, neener…

Just kidding… Well… A little bit, but kinda serious too… In any case, that right there would be the subjective observation…

Okay, now let’s see if we can get that chicken married off to that rooster…

As I was going through the stacks of negatives in search of nostalgic shots of 16-18 year old journalism students collecting MIPA awards, prattling nonsensically into microphones, or just generally being teenagers who happened to have to good fortune of working at a high school radio station, I ran across a manila folder labeled “B&W Proofs – Kat in Advertisement“.

You see, during the old recording studio/photo studio days, one of our partners actually worked in the darkroom at a local advertising agency. Whenever they would have a local job we had the opportunity to bid on it. And so, one Saturday morning, I received a phone call from my friend, telling me the agency needed an “emergency product shoot with a model” for a big client. They needed proofs and slides by that evening and on top of that they had not yet hired a model. As it turned out, models and photographers were apparently hard for them to come by at the last minute, so they wanted to know if we could handle it. The specs were fairly simple… They wanted us to shoot a roll of Black and White Negatives and a roll of Color Transparencies, (AKA – slides), of a pretty woman, clad in business clothing, filling a tire on a nice looking car, using the client’s product. That product was, of course, a fix-a-flat in a can sort of thing.

So, we loaded up the equipment, ran my relatively new Cutlass Supreme through the car wash… The Cutlass was a company car provided by the computer repair outfit for which I worked full time back then… and then set up a shoot on the parking lot of the studio with our model….

And, as you can see from the pictures, our model was none other than E K herself. Yes… E K… In a matter of a 60-minute shoot and about 2 hours in a darkroom, the Evil One became the hands, face, and legs of “The Pump,” Pyroil’s fix-a-flat in a can. Yep, she was the “Tire Babe” in advertisements and promotional materials around the country. I often wonder if they did up one of those life-sized cardboard cutouts to use as a display in auto parts stores. If they did, something tells me some grease monkey somewhere has one tacked up on the wall in his garage…

At least, let’s hope it’s just the garage…

So, why am I telling you all this? Simple… Besides being one of those little bits of nostalgia that just happened to slap me in the back of the head, there’s an even more important point… An extremely important point, in fact, even if it is purely selfish and a tad bit juvenile… But hey, I’m a guy and it’s my job to be juvenile every now and then…

At any rate, the point would be the following… Not only did this zit-faced, klutzy, outcast nerd marry a cheerleader, he married a model… Yeah… Bite me again.

So, can I get a big ol’ “neener neener” from the crowd?

Yeah, life is good… And, I’m one hell of a lucky bastard… I know that.  But, it really is too bad E K doesn’t have that drill team uniform anymore…

More to come…

Murv