He calls himself Agent Zero. His shirt number is a big, fat zero. And this accurately reflects the number of tweets Gilbert Arenas has posted to his Twitter account.
It's not that Arenas, the Washington Wizards point guard, isn't confident of his literary skills. Oh, no. Just look at his finely sculpted blog.
However, according to The Washington Post, Arenas has no interest in being a small time Twitter player. He wants 1 million followers before he will start to offer tweets from his copious and wondrous life and imagination.
Just last week Arenas told the Associated Press that he's chosen to go for 1 million because "it's so far-fetched."
And when some cruel know-it-all tried to point out that the way folks normally get followers is, well, by tweeting, Arenas replied with the sagacity of Wittgenstein: "I'm trying to do the opposite."
So that you can get some sense of Arenas' twittering possibilities, I have embedded a small piece of film featuring the Arenas bobblehead, quite a character in its own right.
However, I know you'll be wondering just how far away Arenas is from achieving immortal far-fetchendess. Well, he's pretty close to catching Shaquille O'Neal, who enjoys just over 2.5 million followers.
Yes, Arenas has already amassed, at the time of typing this, 5,717 followers. Perhaps the 4-9 Wizards will need to win a few more games before his Twitter page is swamped by mass anticipation of Arenas' first tweet.
No, this isn't The Onion.
But just look at that headline and wonder how it could possibly be true.
Well, according to Newsday, Canadian teen sensation Justin Bieber was due to conduct an album signing at the Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City, N.Y.
It seems that thousands of teenage girls turned up to mob the wondrous teen hope, a happening perhaps so frightening that Bieber did not turn up.
The Nassau County police became rather concerned that the crowd might break the glass in store windows with its shrieking. (The official word seems to have been "unruly," but teenage girls are never really that.)
So they asked a senior vice president from Island Def Jam Records (Bieber's record label), James A. Roppo, to do what record label executives often do when solving a difficult situation: tweet.
However, he is alleged to have not complied with this endearing request and thus found himself arrested, pending charges that might, according to the police, comprise criminal nuisance, endangering the welfare of a minor, and obstructing government administration.
Kevin Smith of the Nassau County Police told the AP: "We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message. By not cooperating with us, we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk."
What is somewhat peculiar is that a tweet was sent from Justin Bieber's account around the time of the arrest, reading: "they are not allowing me to come into the mall. if you don't leave, I and my fans will be arrested, as the police just told us."
Bieber followed this message up with another tweet pleading for the high-pitched wailers to disperse, just three minutes later.
All this occurred Friday. And, thanks to Bieber himself, I have embedded YouTube footage of the melee at the mall.
Bieber posted a link to this footage Saturday and tweeted, "wow. this upsets me. the mall should of had proper security. They wouldnt let me in! Gotta make this right 4 the fans."
Well, yes, it should of. Just look at the worried faces of the parents. Just listen to the screams of the aficionadas. This is the kind of nightmare many will have experienced after a large tub of dulce de leche eaten well past midnight.
I cannot imagine what Roppo might have said to the police in order to incite their wrath. However, looking at this footage, I suspect that something like "Look at these people!!!! They're outta their minds!!! You really think a tweet is going to stop them from screaming?!!!" might have been part of the dialogue.
It is also pleasantly reassuring that the mall staff appears, near the end of the footage, to have resorted to analog crowd dispersal means. Yes, someone found a loudhailer.
However, I can find no record of any arrests from the scene other than Roppo's. And certainly, no one else appears to have been arrested for refusing to tweet.
Therefore, this truly seems to be a world first. One can only look forward to the day when someone's Facebook friends cause them to be arrested for not updating their status.
I was just sending a tweet about some excellent chicken livers I'd eaten when I espied some information that made my acid perform a refluctive motion.
According to eMarketer, three different digital actuaries declared that Twitter traffic has performed a slight plummet.
While comScore suggested a drop of 8.1 percent in October and Compete estimated 2.1 percent, while Nielsen, that apogee of accuracy, declared a 27.8 percent decline between September and October.
It seems that these figures, blessedly inconsistent as they are, are not taking account of all the third-party and mobile methods of keeping everyone up with your eating, drinking, reading, philosophizing and socializing.
But is it also possible that some people will simply never participate in the Twitter phenomenon, finding it either annoying, uncool, or even too much effort?
With Twitter intent on becoming more businesslike (why does the word 'more' seem slightly redundant here?), 2010 seems destined to be the year that the microblogging service becomes either de rigueur or dazed and confused.
Will Twitter become a permanent habit or a disappearing, perhaps even elitist, fad? I'll tweet Nostradamus and ask him.
You didn't know Nostradamus is on Twitter? Where have you been?
Miley Cyrus is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest and most important musical artists.
So when she recently decided to leave Twitter and rapped on YouTube about it, one imagined that investors in the supposedly billion-dollar company shivered uncontrollably for several days.
As did some who watched the haunting performance in her rap video.
However, now the teeny singer has gone further. She believes that Twitter should be banished from our firmament. And I mean firmament.
You see, in an interview with the B96 radio show in Chicago, embedded for your pleasure, the pop divette declared: "Twitter should just be, like, banned from this universe."
I should say that Miley's speaking voice isn't quite as mellifluous as her singing. What could be? However, please peruse this video and, when it gets to around the 3.30 mark, you might enjoy Miley's Twitter tirade.
A highlight of her invective was, perhaps: "Because people, like, honestly, like, I mean people wanna know why, like, you're, like, unhealthy, and, like, you need, like, get out and do stuff and, like, be in the world instead of being like this (pretends to be hunched over a keyboard) all the time. And, like, all I did was, like, lay in bed all the time."
I know there will be some who might fear that Miley has removed herself from Twitter because the 140 character limit did not allow her full expression of her likes and thoughts.
However, I am confident that this deeply introspective performer is merely trying to warn her fellow teens of the dangers of immersing yourself far too much in, well, yourself.
As she further cautioned: "I"m not really a big fan of the Internet any more. I don't really get online."
Should you or your children be concerned that Miley might disappear entirely from the Internet, please rush to purchase some of Miley's fine recordings, which are available at iTunes.
Moreover, at MileyCyrus.com, you can secure examples of her highly stylish, Miley stylish collection of clothing. Regretfully, the current link doesn't go through directly to the Miley Cyrus collection on Walmart.com, which might be something of an oversight. You can also still find Miley on Myspace.com/mileycyrus.
Alternatively, you could spend all of your energies trying to save Fuzzy.
You see, Fuzzy's owner, who is possibly humorous or perhaps, like, demented, has declared that she will kill her cat Fuzzy on November 16 unless Miley returns to the world of the tweet.
At Twitter.com/mileysavefuzzy, you can participate in the important debate concerning Fuzzy's future.
You can also go to Mileysavefuzzy.com to learn more about how Fuzzy is to be cooked in the event of his demise. Eating a cat is not, allegedly, illegal in the country in which Fuzzy resides.
How can anyone not, like, like the Internet?
Perhaps you were one of those who voted for your favorite corpse to be one who will participate in the Tweance.
The Tweance? Yes, the Halloween seance to be performed upon the heavenly medium that is Twitter.
Famous and entirely reliable psychic Jayne Wallace is to tweet her way to and through heaven and hell this Friday, between the hours of 10 a.m. and midday British Thoroughly Awful Time (3 a.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific)
We, the grieving earthly leftbehinds, were asked by the organizers--some folks called Angels Fancy Dress--to vote for our most cherished and lost stars. However, time permitted that only four would be awoken from their eternal slumber by a tweet.
I can now reveal the entirely stunning news that Michael Jackson will be among the four and will unquestionably be answering the query that is on everyone's mind: are there fine doctors in heaven?
Joining him in this immortal twittering spectacle will be, yes, truly, Kurt Cobain. And nuzzling up closely with his celestial cell phone will be River Phoenix.
The fourth member of this dead artists' supergroup might feel he has little in common with the other three.
He didn't seem to die of an overdose of one kind of drug or another. In fact, the worst thing he has ever been accused of was a spot of plagiarism and allowing himself to be portrayed in a movie by Joseph Fiennes.
Yes, you can go to twitter.com/Tweance at the appointed time and listen to William Shakespeare himself.
Does he feel love's labor has, indeed, been lost? Is his favorite movie "Hamlet" or "Macbeth?" And does he really have a thing for Gwyneth Paltrow?
I am deeply disappointed that Jeffrey Dahmer, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Lay, Anna-Nicole Smith, Chief Inspector Morse, Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopez, and Golda Meir failed to make the cut.
However, I feel sure that the presence of William Shakespeare will elevate the Tweance to the status of a permanent event in the world's spiritual calendar.
I'm sorry to be mentioning sex again. But I have some survey findings that might just interrupt your own cogitations about the meaning and function of life.
The fine and upstanding folks at Retrevo.com, which, I believe, is a site where you can buy various sorts of electronica with which to record your most public and private moments, decided to survey today's under-35s.
And what appalling people they seem to be.
Indeed, Retrevo's findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one's own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the "leading thinkers in the radical tech community" who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: "The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will."
I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: "I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make sex suck and staring at paint drying the greatest thing ever."
But where would we be without the current version of sex? No governors of South Carolina dancing the Argentine tango. No jokes about presidents and cigars. And not anyone telling us that, indeed, we are the best.
What a dull thing the future might turn out to be.
Which brings us back to the current state of concupiscence and Retrevo's discovery that 36 percent of people leap on to Twitter or Facebook immediately after conjugal behavior.
Not just once or twice, but "often." What can they possibly be tweeting? What words and phrases can their Facebook updates possibly enjoy? "Jeffrey H. has just got some"? "Melissa J. is in flagrante"?
Or perhaps something as very basic as "Tracy T. is single"?
My gob is quite simply smacked at the idea that people must trumpet their intimate behavior within seconds of its climax. I do, however, have more interesting information.
Apparently, men are twice as likely to broadcast to their social network immediately post-flagrante than are women. This despite women allegedly being the majority on most social networks.
And if you are one of those who believes that iPhone users are deeply narcissistic nabobs, then please consider this most disturbing piece of news: iPhone users are three times more likely to tweet or Facebook post-coitally than are BlackBerry users.
I find myself so completely shaken by this data that I feel an inordinate need to lie down for a period of some months.
Has this social-networking nonsense so completely gripped our very beings that we are nothing other than newscasters of our own ridiculous subjectivity?
My girlfriend says she'll let me know what she thinks about this, but first she's got a few tweets to send.
If you have been trying to tweet Michael Jackson over the last few weeks without even a squeak of success, might I sing you a song of hope?
A remarkably forward-thinking psychic has decided to hold a seance on Twitter. A "Tweance," if you will.
According to the Sun newspaper, Jayne Wallace, who claims to have been a psychic since she was (at least) 7 years old, will be available to every member of the world's tweeting population on October 30, between 10 a.m. and noon British Miserable Autumn Time (that's 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. PT).
Your rapt attention span and your rapid powers of cogitation will have noted that the date and time enjoy a chilling proximity to Halloween, the night when many dead people may rise from the grave and dance in unison to Michael Jackson's "Thriller."
You have the chance, on this suspiciously auspicious Halloween eve, of picking a deceased star and a question you would like to ask that person, then waiting for your reply from on high--or, who knows, perhaps even from the infernal below.
You will be excited to the point of cardiac incarceration to hear that the Tweance's Twitter page is already active. Be ready with a question the whole world will want answered.
Perhaps you would like to discover whether Guitar Hero 5 makes Kurt Cobain, well, turn over in his grave. Or whether Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy have philosophical disagreements.
Perhaps you might want a TwitPic submission of a smiling James Dean or a confirmation of your suspicion that Che Guevara is hanging with a rather conservative crowd these days.
Or you could be one of those strange people who wonders whether John Lennon and Florence Nightingale might occasionally make out when the afterlife authorities aren't looking.
Whatever your feelings about those who have famously left us, the Tweance is unquestionably your chance to confront your deepest curiosities.
Now that Halloween is reaching its socially networked nirvana, history may now enjoy a radical revision.
There are those moments in the business cycle of a young dynamic brand when people look back and say: "If only that hadn't happened."
And so it is with Twitter. And so it is with Miley Cyrus.
You see Miley, she who is sometimes Hannah Montana, was rapidly becoming one of Twitter's most trusted Swiss Guards. She had almost 2 million followers.
Now the sheep have lost their shepherdess. For Miley Cyrus has silenced her tweets, starved her Twitter feed, and drifted off into the uncertain socially not-working darkness from which some stars never return.
This is clearly a disaster for Twitter. Microblogging needs micro people to bring in the macro crowds. Cyrus, who is possibly only four or five years old in real life, was one of Twitter's most durable pre-pubescent predilections.
After her painful and dramatic departure, how can coming generations take the brand seriously?
Perhaps worse, though, is the means Cyrus chose to deliver her beating on tweeting. Yes, she went on YouTube. And, yes, she performed a "Good-Bye, Twitter" rap.
In the rap, she dismisses the idea that she was forced to quit Twitter by her boyfriend, Liam Hemsworth, an Australian actor perhaps most famous for his role as, well, Miley Cyrus's boyfriend.
If my ears served me correctly, Cyrus seems to suggest in this musical tour-de-farce that she was concerned that she had begun to "tweet her pimples."
I was not aware that she had pimples, nor that she had attempted to tweet them. But I am concerned that she may have tried to do this without the appropriate medical supervision.
However, before my cup of concern overflowed into my glass of cabernet, I could hear the world's next Streisand rap that no one really cares if she's "playing with Noah" or "doing my hair."
I am not sure who Noah might be, but the underlying arc of pain seems to have been caused by those horrid gossipy tabloids trawling through her tweets, like investigative journalists digging into Elton John's garbage cans, in search of juicy information.
In a disturbingly out-of-sync climax, Cyrus declares she wants "her private life private" and that is done "trying to please."
It is a confessional that will surely make so many of the world's parents weep. Indeed, Cyrus admits that she became a little obsessed with Katy Perry and Britney, but that she is now "peacin' out."
As I peace together this seminal moment in social-networking history, I find myself saddened beyond measure that one of the world's great Twitterers may have been forever lost.
Nonethless, I know that you, together with the Twitter hierarchy, will cling on to the fact that one of the world's other great rappers, Kevin Federline, appears to still have a Twitter account.
Love and Microsoft are entities that, at times, have had a fractious relationship.
However, take one glance at the new TV ad for Windows Phone and you will see just how much progress has been made to bring a little healing to that Microsoft feeling.
A man, who looks suspiciously moody and French, is leaving his apartment.
His lover is pleading with him to stay. But wait he has more than one lover. He has, well, five, six, seven of them. Well, he is French, right?
There's something strange about these lovers too. It's not that they seem tired after a night of passionate application to the art of lovemaking. No, these are simply passionate applications.
They are Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, and, good Lord, is that Twitter twitching like, well, a technically troubled teenager?
How can this man, this louche, sleepy-eyed Frenchman, leave these sweet, tempting applications behind in his apartment while he goes off gallivanting with, who knows, a Snow Leopard?
But wait, this is not like those French movies where the ugly guy gets the girl, then gets the girls, and is still eternally unsatisfied with his existential lot.
No, this Frenchman has a sense of humor.
Just when you are about to burst into tears at his callous, Gallic behavior, he turns back toward his applications and waves his cell phone to show them that, yes, he loves them and, no, there is no second family of applications in Marseilles.
The applications, filled with love and iconic commitment, gaily skip down the steps of his apartment building and begin to bundle themselves into his car. Love is the journey, not the destination.
And, in a final gesture of untrammeled human humility, the Twitter icon knows its rightful place in this menage-a-many: the back end.
As it slides into the trunk, my heart hops, skips, jumps, and almost flies through my T-shirt as I whisper to myself: "Microsoft. It's a love thing."
It will take time to get used to the concept, but I know that, as in all relationships that start out with good intentions, everything is possible.
It is not easy to feed the egos of Hollywood celebrities. It is not even easy to merely feed their intestines.
This seems to be the conclusion one reaches from the story of Jon-Barrett Ingels, waiter to the stars. Well, now former waiter to the stars.
You see, Ingels was merely an extra in the vast set that is Beverly Hills. He would be still or sparkling, depending on his audience. And occasionally, he would turn his Twitter account into a diary of how hard it was to make his daily bread.
According to the delightful Los Angeles Times blog Brand X, Ingels worked at the Barney Greengrass establishment in Beverly Hills. I am not entirely familiar with it. However, a minuscule drift toward Citysearch reveals to me that within its exquisite walls, one can espy not only the Olsen twins, but also Pamela Anderson.
So it would not have fazed Ingels at all to greet Jane Adams, she of the HBO penis-inspired series "Hung" and formerly the terribly neurotic skinny thing who consorted with Niles on "Frasier." According to Ingels, Adams ordered a soup and a lemonade, and for this sustenance received an entirely reasonable check for $13.44.
Adams allegedly explained that she left her wallet in her car. Ingels said she could go out and get it, but he claims that she never returned that day.
Now, given that a large swath of Hollywood waiters are aspiring writers, actors, and gigolos, one should be unsurprised that Ingels subsequently blogged about this episode at HowToSucceedAsAFailure, which appears to be his magnum opus. Or perhaps magnum hopeless.
When a representative materialized the next day to pay for Adams' food, Ingels felt empowered to tweet at his Twitter account, PapaBarrett: "Tues: Jane Adams, star of HBO series "Hung," skipped out on a $13.44 check. Her agent called and payed the following day. NO TIP!!!"
Oh, Papa. Oh, Momma. Could he not hear the train coming even then? Well, no. When other celebrities were brought to his table, Barrett continued to tweet with an eagle's eye and a teenage boy's brain.
Ali Larter, the famous, um, person from "Heroes," was "not wearing a bra". BJ Novak, the louche and wayward intern from "The Office", was, perish the concept, "hungover."
As for Tori Spelling, she of the rather classic "Beverly Hills, 90210" and no obvious plastic surgery, well, Ingels described her as having "become hot." In the very same tweet, he offered indiscreetly that she eats "salami eggs and onions."
This was all within a few days in July. A month later, Ingels claims that Adams wandered into the restaurant, rather upset, and gave him his $3 tip. Ingels offered her platitudes of the "Aw, you didn't have to" sort. But Adams, he says, exclaimed, "Well, I read about it on Twitter!"
You know that the power of microblogging is such that this does not have a happy ending. Yes, Ingels was put out to green grass.
Of Adams, he muttered to Brand X, "All she could think about was herself and her pride and her ego."
I am not sure whether this was before he tweeted on August 15, "For the record, I think Jane Adams (Hung) is a great actress!!" and "Jane Adams (Hung), if you're listening, I am producing a Web series and would love you in it!!!"
So now PapaBarrett is unemployed but still tweeting. On September 10, he bemoaned that though the NFL has a Twitter policy, Barneys New York (visited by many a Greengrass patron) does not.
Jon-Barrett Ingels currently has 457 followers. He lists his occupation as "Unemployed, thanks to Twitter."
