Category Archives: Social media

I don’t know why I’m getting these ads on Facebook

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OK, so I’m a guy. I get that. You’re trying to market to lowest common denominators, and there is no lower common denominator among heterosexual guys than their interest in… what you’re showing me.risque ads

But this does not sum me up. It doesn’t even fit my Internet habits. Yeah, I may have paused to enjoy YouTube clips such as this one, but I thought that was kind of cute and harmless, and Google is leaping to conclusions when it thinks that’s the only kind of video I want to see. (Which it does sometimes, suggesting things such as these.)

I look at my Chrome history, and I see all sorts of topics, from breaking news to multiple attempts to find a quote I half-remembered from Catch-22; from Netflix (to remind me where I stopped in watching “House of Cards”) to the news that ADCO won more ADDY awards than anyone at the 2014 gala over the weekend.

There are no outrageously buxom or nearly nude women, no photographic representations of the Elvis Costello line, “You want her broken with her mouth wide open/’Cause she’s this year’s girl.” Although if you look far enough back, you might find where I looked up some Elvis lyrics.

I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before — in fact, I showed you one of these very ads. It was one of several that seemed to draw a connection between large breasts and learning a foreign language.

But the collection above really seems to have brought this trend down to a new level. Some of these things don’t seem to be just offering French lessons, if you know what I mean.

I suppose I could learn more by clicking on these come-ons. But that would seem to justify them; wouldn’t it? And who knows what kinds of ads I’d start getting…

By comparison, my browsing history startlingly bland...

By comparison, my browsing history is startlingly bland…

That Cindi is just all business, even on Twitter

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Had to smile when I noticed that Cindi Scoppe had posted something in Twitter seconds before I did this morning, so that we had back-to-back Tweets:

cindi twitter

That Cindi has always been all business. I use Twitter for serious purposes, too, but I also like to have fun. Which is why I Tweet a lot more than she does (about 10 times as much, so far — but I had a head start).

As for the serious business, by all means go read her piece about other reform measures that would take us a lot further down the line that the one just passed doing away with the Budget and Control Board. It’s stuff I could recite in my sleep, since we started advocating for these things in 1991, but it’s important.

As for my Tweet… You know what I’m talking about, right? After the guy says, “You’re WHAT?!?!” (At 3:37 on this video), I had always heard the response to be, “Ennnn ROUTE… Russss.”

But I was never sure I had it right. So when the song came on the radio this morning, I flipped on my SoundHound app while waiting at a red light, and the lyrics that came up said that the line was… “Tin roof, rusted.” (And no, I wasn’t driving while I Tweeted. I waited until I was seated at breakfast.)

If that’s right, it’s a disappointment. I thought my version sounded kind of off, but it’s more logical as a response to “You’re WHAT?” Because, you know, much of the song has to do with traveling TO the Love Shack. So you might naturally tell someone you were en route.

But you don’t care, do you? I can see that. So go read Cindi’s piece. Edify yourself.

2014 Winter Weather Wimp Award goes to… SC Legislature

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Aiee! A snowflake! Run away; run away! /Flickr photo by Pen Waggener

Aiee! A snowflake! Run away; run away! /Flickr photo by Pen Waggener

Dang, I hate it when this happens!

This morning over breakfast, I saw a Tweet that said the Legislature was canceling the whole week’s sessions because of “the possibility of snow,” or “the probability of inclement weather,” or something along those lines.

So on my way to my laptop, I came up with Winter Weather Wimp Award, and I dug the alliteration (especially that sneaky last “W” in “Award”), and I couldn’t wait to sit down, go grab that Tweet, and mercilessly mock it.

And I can’t find it. Either I misremembered it, or someone realized how ridiculous it sounded and took it down.

But in any case, the Legislature is shutting down for the whole week, even though not a flake has fallen.

So I’m giving them the award anyway. They earned it. And there was plenty of competition. Why, even the U.S. Army has surrendered at the threat of a flake — most of Fort Jackson will be closed.

And to think, just over 69 years ago (wow — has it been that long?), the U.S. Army was living in frozen foxholes in the Ardennes during the coldest European winter on record, and a previously unsuspected German army just rolled right over the 106th Infantry Division (capturing both my father-in-law and Kurt Vonnegut)… but did the Army quit? No. They cut off the advance and knocked the remaining Nazis right back into Germany, fighting them and the ice and snow at the same time.

That’s when men were men, even with frozen toes. Of course, I must confess, it was before my time. Me, I’ve got my L.L. Bean snow boots out in the truck, waiting to put them on and go crunching through the snow when it arrives, pretending that I’m hardy and indomitable…

Twitter more racially diverse than rest of Web (and, I’m guessing, way more so than this blog)

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This, from the WSJ, sort of surprised me:

For most of its rather short life, Twitter rarely mentioned that its user base is more racially diverse than U.S. Internet users as a whole. Now, as a newly minted public company needing to generate revenue, it is moving to capitalize on its demographics.

In November, Twitter hired marketing veteran Nuria Santamaria to a new position as multicultural strategist, leading its effort to target black, Hispanic and Asian-American users.

Together, those groups account for 41% of Twitter’s 54 million U.S. users, compared with 34% of the users of rival Facebook and 33% of all U.S. Internet users, according to Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project….

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s racist of me to have assumed that Twitter was way white. I think it probably had something to do with it being a geeky medium, and I think of geeks as white, the fictional Rajesh Koothrappali notwithstanding.

Facebook, as it turns out, is every bit as white bread as I thought it was. Twitter, less so.

These are not vast differences, but it seems meaningful that the Twitterverse is 50 percent blacker than the U.S. population as a whole. I don’t know what it means, but it seems it means something.

Lest you throw stones at me for being taken by surprise, I’ll have you know that many of my friends/followers/contacts are non-white. Although…

And I’ve sort of wondered about this…

I find myself associating more with nonwhite friends and acquaintances in real life than in the Twitterverse, or elsewhere on the Web. Look at my church (especially the Mass I attend, which is in Spanish), or the membership of the Capital City Club, etc.

In fact, and I hope I’m not insulting anyone here, I kinda think of most of y’all as white. Based on the regulars I actually have met — Kathryn, Doug, Silence, Bryan, Karen, Phillip, Bud, Mark, KP, etc. — that seems overwhelmingly the case. Of course, that’s totally anecdotal, but I tend to pick up on a pretty white vibe in most of our conversations.

This blog seems to lack crossover appeal. Unlike Twitter. I knew Twitter was cool, but I didn’t realize it could be quantified to this extent….

Sir Patrick Stewart on the various accents of British cows

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This seems a natural followup to our discussion the other day about how American and British accents — human accents — diverged.Patrick_Stewart_by_Gage_Skidmore

I didn’t listen to it until today, although it was brought to my attention yesterday by Professor Elemental. Let this be a lesson to you that when the Professor recommends something, one should drop everything and attend to it immediately, because otherwise one is missing out unnecessarily.

It’s a podcast in which Sir Patrick Stewart answers an American listener’s question regarding whether British cows moo differently — or rather, whether British people moo differently when imitating cows. (Although his answer speaks more to the first question.)

Sir Patrick answered the question thoroughly and respectfully. His answer, in part:

“It’s not a straight-forward, simple answer unlike, probably, many other country where a cow’s moo is a cow’s moo. In England, you understand, we are dominated by class, by social status, and by location. So, for example, a cow that is in the field next to my house in West Oxfordshire would moo in one kind of way, and a cow in a field in the semi-industrial town I grew up in in the North of England would moo in another kind of way….

Well, if I were at home in West Oxfordshire right now and I walked down my lane and there were all these cows and I say, ‘Hi, good morning, cows. And they would moo at me like this: ‘Mooooooouhh.’ Now that’s a very conservative moo…”

You should listen to the whole thing (the “listen” button is at the bottom of the post). Or at least, as the site recommends, don’t stop before he gets to the Cockney moo…

OK, guys: No more selling cheap knockoffs in the Sunni Triangle, OK?

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lon asgeles

“Armed Sunni fighters take up positions in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah.” Mohammed Jalil / EPA

First, by way of appeasing the Fair Use gods, allow me to point out that the above is merely a low-res screengrab of a far superior image over at The Washington Post (by Mohammed Jalil of european pressphoto agency) and that I urge you sincerely to follow the link and see the wonderful gallery of images of which it forms a mere part, and to enjoy lots of other great content at the WashPost, in fact to subscribe, and to give all your custom to that great newspaper’s advertisers.

And I’m using it in order to make an editorial point. A silly one, but a point nonetheless. Hence Fair Use, right?

This morning, in my continuing quest to send new readers to the Post, I Tweeted about this story, which on the main page of the Post‘s iPad app was headlined, “Iraq turmoil stirs fears of civil war.” My observation was that it “Looks like they’ve already got one.”

Robert Ariail followed the link, and noticed something I had missed: “Check out the RPG-toting dude wearing a ‘Lon Asgeles’ sweat shirt.”

Ow. I found myself wondering how much he shelled out for that jacket (which he’s managed to keep pretty clean given that he’s engaged in, or preparing to engage in, ground combat), and marveling at what a maelstrom of conflicting emotions must surge in that man’s breast. The jacket seems to speak, however imperfectly, to aspirations to embrace Western culture. Yet he’s fighting with the jihadists. What’s his back story? Was he so ticked off that somebody sold him a defective knockoff that it turned him into a terrorist? Or at least to take up arms, since the cutline on this photo doesn’t specify which faction he’s with?

Probably not, but one wonders…

The thing that makes Pope Francis special

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bruised-church

Sometime over the last few days, someone shared the above quote on Facebook, which caused me to have three thoughts:

  1. Yes, that’s a nice quote, which speaks to what the Church is supposed to be. Here’s some context.
  2. There’s nothing new in it. If you had asked Pope Benedict whether that was a sound assertion, he would have agreed. Probably. Surely John Paul II would have.
  3. Why do people post things like this as images, rather than text, so that you can’t just copy and paste them? Is this another sign that we are moving toward a post-literate society? Drives me nuts…

And then I moved on.

But I ran across it again later, and had another thought:

Yes, other popes would have agreed with it, but Pope Francis chooses, unbidden, to assert this over and over. This is his chosen message. This is what he wants you to hear, and understand, about the Church and about Christianity.

And that’s what makes him special. It’s why the world welcomes him so joyfully. It’s why the guy can’t even leave an ordinary voice message for some nuns without it going viral. People love the guy. And that’s because the message he chooses, first and foremost, is that of love…

Famously Hot New Year, 2013-2014

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A video, some Tweets and images from last night…

Watching the @FamouslyHotNYE festivities from @CapCityClubCola, going to descend for some music on the street… #fhny

Digging some Z. Z. Ward down on the street @FamouslyHotNYE. Very bluesy at the moment… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/jR7jxfzhNI

Z. Z. Ward singing a song called “Cryin’ Wolf.” Says it’s about drinking. Very popular selection with the crowd @FamouslyHotNYE… #FHNY

Discreetly in the background @FamouslyHotNYE, like a roadie backstage, lurks the State House itself, beating heart of power in SC… #FHNY

Your correspondent, on the scene.

Your correspondent, on the scene.

 

Oops; forgot to show you the State House… See it back there? #FHNY pic.twitter.com/fiPn00A9EB

Z. Z. Ward favoring the appreciative crowd with one more number before Kool and the Gang… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/lPMAFB4QBt

A quick glimpse of the swelling, surging throng @FamouslyHotNYE… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/nLL8hqndYo

Brad Warthen ‏@BradWarthen21h
So jealous of this item @pushdigital, overlooking @FamouslyHotNYE. https://bradwarthen.com  needs one of these. #FHNYpic.twitter.com/4yO09qgWyX

Kool & the Gang in tha house! Or on the street. Whatever… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/SydQXkOOZf

Kool & the Gang kooling off the Famously Hot Columbia, SC, crowd in front of State House @FamouslyHotNYE… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/Mq9Qig13fW

One lone, Famously Hot soul boogeying at the top of the State House steps to Kool and the Gang… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/BLQyyKsZbX

Kool and the Gang schooling the young folk of Famously Hot Columbia, SC, as to what FUNK sounds like… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/wMmcsK9FaD

Love the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band jacket on Kool and the Gang’s trombonist! #FHNY

Am I the only one who finds it a bit odd that the most active live tweeter at Columbia SC’s Famously Hot New Year’s is @BradWarthen? #fhny

@DanCookSC Hey, @FreeTimesSC didn’t name me one of the Twitterati for nothing… #FHNY

I’m doing a Nerd Dance on Gervais, like Dick at the end of “High Fidelity.” Sorry. Obscure pop culture reference there… #FHNY

And… a big finish with fireworks… #FHNY pic.twitter.com/Ow35UaPJQa

 

 

@ViewingHistory: Images we may have missed at the time

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Just started following a brand-new Twitter feed, @ViewingHistory. It’s less than a day old, and only has seven Tweets so far. But I like what I see.

The above picture is captioned, “Soviet paratrooper over Leningrad (Date Unknown).” It seems appropriate that this photo be accompanied by the Soviet national anthem, which I always thought was quite stirring (I got chills when the crew on the sub sang it in “Hunt for Red October”).

Then, for view at another old adversary, I was really intrigued by the below image, captioned, “German soldier applying a dressing to wounded Russian civilian, 1941.”

Gee. I didn’t know Germans ever treated Russians like that during that war. Of course, it stands to reason — people are people, and decency will be found in the unlikeliest places. Perhaps you will find the image comforting, in that it renews some faith in people…

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Hanging out at the Myrtle Beach airport

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Haven’t been blogging because I’ve been really busy, between holidays and some big work deadlines.

But listening to Nick Lowe’s “Christmas at the Airport” just now (yeah, I’m still listening to such, here on the 6th day of Christmas), I thought I’d give a sample of what I’ve been doing instead of writing in this forum.

Last night, my wife and I drove to Myrtle Beach to send my youngest daughter up to Boston to visit a friend for a few days. She had found a bargain on the Web, and it involved flying from MB.

The flight was for 10:32 p.m. They ended up not boarding until almost 12:30 a.m. So we hung out at the airport for a time, part of which we filled by running through my daughter’s homemade Thai flash cards. (She’s heading off to the Peace Corps in a couple of weeks.)

During lulls in language study, I also Tweeted the following. Since a couple of them got some reTweets, I share:

Myrtle Beach airport more spacious-seeming than expected…

When a flight’s departure is delayed 2 hours, airline should foot open tab in bar for passengers. If the airport HAS a bar…

2 girls in MB airport killing time giving each other rides in luggage cart. Elder girl says, “Let’s do this until they yell at us…”

Airline woman who told us flight was delayed has stopped the girls having fun with luggage cart. Madame Buzzkill…

When your late-night flight is delayed two hours, this sign in the airport seems particularly apropos… pic.twitter.com/2g0fsBrJHz

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No hard feelings between Clowney, cops

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Not sure what to make of this, beyond concluding that Jadeveon Clowney is a good-natured young man.

He Tweeted out the above picture today with the words:

We in here me and my boys lol

I’m not sure that being charged with going 110 mph is an LOL matter, but that’s probably because I’m a sour-natured, buzz-killing alter cocker.

Nikki got her gun, and she wants you to know it

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Image from Nikki Haley's Facebook page.

Image from Nikki Haley’s Facebook page.

Anyone who has seen her display her unarmed-defense skills may understand why Nikki Haley might want a gun — that is, if they forget for a moment that she has an armed escort, provided at state expense.

But say she didn’t have protective detail. Say she actually felt a need to defend herself.

Why would she brag to the world that she now has a nice, new Beretta 9mm?

See, I wouldn’t. I’d prefer to keep the bad guys guessing. I would neither want to advertise to potential assailants that if they came at me, they’d better use deadly force (and shoot first), or to tell them that I had a valuable item on me that it might be worth shooting me in order to steal.

Nor would I want to let my kids know that I had a handgun, because I’d worry that they’d do what I always did as a kid — find my Dad’s, wherever he’d hid it, and get it out and play with it. (Yes, I always made sure it was unloaded before practicing my quick-draw — something that was easier to do with a revolver than with a semi-automatic, which takes more skill and wariness in order to remember to check the chamber.)

But that’s me. To me, a gun is just a gun. It’s not something I feel I have to flash on Facebook in order to curry favor with a political base…

Saintly standup

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One of the many Twitter feeds I follow offered this thought today:

I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much. -Mother Teresa

Bada-BOOM, tchk.

Good one, even though I’ve heard it before. In the all-time greatest theologically-sound standup lines by Saints, that would come not far beyond Augustine’s classic “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

The Thing I Hate Most About Facebook (at the moment)

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And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of.
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Still grumbling about strong-mayor, and irritated by bad Christmas music everywhere (I’m going to do a Top Five List on that sometime in the next few days), I might as well abuse Facebook.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about Facebook, but this tops them all…

I always leave it running on a tab on my browser, alongside Twitter and a couple of different views of my blog’s dashboard, my email, my calendar and the public face of the blog itself. Those are all things I click and alt-tab back and forth among a lot, and it’s far more convenient to have them all running simultaneously than to have to call each one up when I need it.

Almost invariably, when I click back to the Facebook tab, at the very top of my screen will be something interesting that I had meant to click on and read earlier, but hadn’t had the time, and left sitting there for when I did have time.

Only now, when I click on the FB tab, and I see that interesting thing in front of me for ONE SECOND, I yell “No! Don’t!” as the page automatically refreshes and brings up whatever is the most recent thing on my feed, which invariably will be something not interesting at all — thereby burying what I wanted to read under an avalanche of irrelevant material.

So I have to go hunting for the interesting thing.

That’s what I hate most about Facebook. At the moment.

The Word of the Year, and a picture to go with it

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I learned this from listening to NPR this morning:

Good morning. I’m Renee Montagne announcing the word of the year: Selfie. The Smartphone self-portrait. The Oxford Dictionary says it perfectly captures 2013. Selfies lit up social media and dirty ones derailed political careers. Teens even took one with the Pope. The word’s come a long way since popping up on an Australian message board a decade ago. It beat out binge watch, meaning marathon TV watching, and twerk. You can look that one up.

But what really made me enjoy the news was this Tweet from NASA’s Curiosity Rover:

selfie

By the way, as a guy who has had occasion to shoot a number of pictures of himself over the years, what with blogging and the avatars needed for social media, I really don’t like the way that word sounds.

How to cure gerrymandering: Draw all districts to look like South Carolina

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800px-South_Carolina_in_United_States

Easily the most beautifully shaped of all the states.

End of last week, Bryan Caskey shared with me this link to an MSNBC host (apparently, his name is Touré — no last name) seeming to suggest that some red-state U.S. senators were voting more conservatively because they live and govern “in a gerrymandered world.”

Which seemed to suggest that this guy thought that, you know, states were gerrymandered.

This caused Bryan to riff, “Yup. I’m OK with redrawing some state lines, though. Who knows, it might be fun.”

To which I responded, “Not SC, though. It has the most aesthetically pleasing shape of all the states.”

Which it does. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve grooved on SC’s beautiful, kinda-but-not-exactly-regular triangle shape. (There were several irregularly-shaped paving tiles outside my grandparents’ back door, and one of them looked just like SC, which to me had some sort of cosmic significance.) If it were a perfect, equilateral triangle, it would be less beautiful. It’s more of a naturalistic triangle. I like the cockeyed top, which makes it seem to be wearing a hat rakishly tilted to the side.

And then it occurred to me — if all districts (as opposed to states) had to be drawn to look more or less like South Carolina, gerrymandering would be dead. A district that looked like SC in shape terms would also look like real communities in a demographic sense, rather than having these super-white and super-black districts side-by-side.

And there would be relatively few “safe” Democratic and Republican districts. Which means elected representatives on the federal, state and local levels would have to reach out to voters across the political spectrum. Gridlock would end, and sensible, pragmatic legislation would be a commonplace.

And we’d all live in a better country.

I like this idea more and more…

A conversation about Iran nuke negotiations

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I recently resumed having my Tweets automatically posted to Facebook, to broaden the conversation, and was quickly reminded of two reasons why I don’t like that:

  1. I lose control of how it posts. For instance, Facebook randomly grabs a header image that has nothing to do with the post, instead of the image that I deliberately included as part of the post. Which is maddening.
  2. My friends and readers launch conversations about the posts over there, instead of here on the blog. Which is even more maddening, because the whole reason I let the items post on FB is to bring more people here.

Anyway, here’s a conversation from today on FB. It all started with an editorial from this morning’s Wall Street Journal praising France for hitting the brakes on a pending deal with Iran:

The persistence of triviality, in every medium

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My readers here — hip, happening and with it as they are — hold Twitter in scorn as good for nothing better than telling what you just ordered at Starbucks (which they, inexplicably, regard as unimportant).

Not that I’m hurt or anything, but not one, not one of you has yet congratulated me for reaching the 10,000-Tweet mark. Because you think it’s a waste of time.

And you can certainly find mind-numbingly trivial junk there, right next to items of profound importance.

For instance, today I was very impressed by this Tweet from Nicholas Kristof linking to his column, which is something I needed to read:

kristof

There is no journalist in America who is better than Kristof at making me feel like, whatever I did today, it was ridiculously trivial compared to the way he spends every day.

Then again, I’ve never spent a day as frivolously as this:

beast

Don’t bother with the link. It’s as stupid as it sounds.

Anyway, that was right next to the Kristof piece in my Twitter feed.

Now, some of you are saying, “See there! That’s what I’m talking about! Twitter is useless!”

But stop and think — every other news medium is dragged down by the same nonsense.

And with Twitter, if I get too many of those, I can just stop following the Daily Beast, further refining my feed to the Kristof end of the seriousness spectrum.

TIME: ‘The 140 Moments That Made Twitter Matter’

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collage1

TIME must have had a lot of fun putting this together.

Maybe you don’t think Twitter matters at all. Maybe you think I’ve been wasting my time posting those 10,000 Tweets. Well, you’re wrong.

But don’t listen to me. Just peruse this collection of moments — with separate lists of #Fails, #Feuds, #Scoops, #Stunts, #Backtracks, #Rants, #Raves, #LOLz, #Debuts and #GameChangers — when Twitter really did matter.

Yeah, a lot of those are just fun, but many are serious. No one can doubt any more the power of Twitter as a medium that means business.

You can’t deny the power when…

Yeah, it’s a little less earth-shaking when a Hollywood star finds a fresh way to make a public fool of himself. Yeah, Alec Baldwin, I’m talking about you.

But there’s no question that Twitter matters now. And you don’t even need 140 characters to say that, to mean it — or too prove it.

Yes, that's Patrick Stewart posing in front of a sign that says "Picard." You sort of have to know about "Star Trek" to get this...
Yes, that’s Patrick Stewart posing in front of a sign that says “Picard.” You sort of have to know about “Star Trek” to get this. This is from the #LOLz category…