A beautiful gift from Twitter

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture 4 Comments
The usual gift from Twitter

The usual gift from Twitter

For ineffable reasons, Twitter has suggested that I follow this well-to-do child. I will not be following a child via Twitter or any other means, but there is something perfect about the Twitter presence of this particular 17 year-old. As a person who worked with well-to-do high school students, I find The RRP archetypal, even classic. He is cool in exactly the way that an affluent teenager is cool, e.g. his description of himself: “17. Swim. HRA.” A Twitter feed is the willful projection of a personality into the world, and adolescence is the willful projection of a personality into adulthood. These two forces in combination make The RRP’s Twitter more than a collection of country club photos and tales of lost sunglasses. It is a distillation of one type of youth. Also, his picture is priceless. You’ll find it after the jump.

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Chuck Grassley’s Twitter a series of riddles

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment
Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA)

Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA)

As you can see from the picture above, in which he takes the con position at the annual Symposium On the World, Chuck Grassley is very old. At 79, he has been a United States senator slightly longer than my brother has been alive. The invention of the internet happened shortly before he qualified for Social Security, and neither of Al Gore’s brainchildren pleases him much. Yet he uses them both. I presume he cashes his Social Security checks in nickels at the grocery store with only his customer loyalty card as ID, because his Twitter is baffling cipher. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for drawing it to our attention.

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Joyce Carol Oates’s Twitter feed is insane

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media, Uncategorized 3 Comments
J-Coates

J-Coates

First of all, I stand by the addition of apostrophe-s to make possessive names ending in s, and so should you. If typing like EB White is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Second, and possibly even more important, Ben al-Fowlkes alerted me to this tweet from Joyce Carol Oates:

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 10.25.35 AM

I admit that I was skeptical. I suspected that this Oates tweet might be parody. And that is how I discovered the treasure trove of insanity that is Joyce Carol Oates’s Twitter feed.

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Kanye West explains problem of social networking, accidentally

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 5 Comments

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian on a zipline tour of Mexico with the dude who owns Girls Gone Wild.

Normally Combat! blog does not concern itself with celebrities, for the simple reason that we are much more interested in ourselves. It is a widespread problem. Anyone who has taught Intro to Creative Writing knows the power of the autobiographical story to fascinate exactly one person. What happens to us is wildly compelling; even if the plot isn’t great, the setting at the center of the universe makes it terrific. What happens to others is boring. It seems like a perfect system, but there’s a flaw. Kanye West found it a couple weeks ago, when he tweeted and quickly deleted the following:

Then Kim was like, “oh, someone mentioned me on Twitter.”

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Is the ZANU-PF Twitter account a hoax?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment

An effigy of Robert Mugabe in Johannesburg’s Gay Pride parade

Yesterday in the comments, Willy pointed out that a lot of people think the @ZANU_PF Twitter account is fake. “Fake” in this context means “not originating from officials of ZANU-PF”—the ruling political party of Zimbabwe headed by dictatorial octogenarian Robert Mugabe—and in this case it is mostly an aesthetic judgment. Back in April, @ZANU-PF seemed to be fueling rumors of Mugabe’s death, an odd choice for the mouthpiece of a party that spends a lot of time insisting its leader is totally healthy. The use of the appellation Cde (for comrade) before everybody’s name seems like something out of screwball comedy, too. Then again, the previous president of Zimbabwe was named Canaan Banana, so who knows what the fudge is going on?

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