Twitters

I am curious about this thing called "twittering"; everyone is doing this, it seems. I don't do it myself, as I think you need a mobile phone for it, and I don't own one. It is an interesting phenomenon nonetheless.

As I understand it, people sign up for this service from which they can send text-based messages that are then published in real time onto web sites and mobile devices. These small messages are limited in length, I assume due to some set of  technological or practical limitations, or both.


I went to the farmers market with a friend recently, where he tweeted that he was buying some mustard greens. I thought that was an odd thing to announce, but my friend calls himself a "foodist" and enjoys talking with other "foodists". At any rate,  it sparked a fascinating if short-lived conversation amongst his fellow twitterers that went something like this:

Foodist Friend: "I'm buying mustard greens."
Some foodist twitterer No 1: "I've never tried mustard greens, do they taste like mustard?"
Some foodist twitterer No2: " I've got a pot of gumbo on the stove."
Some foodist twitterer No 3: " 3 weeks and counting 'till my vay-cay."
Twitterer No 1: "Oh that's so cool. I want to go to Morocco so bad."
Twitterer No2: "Moroccan food kicks ass. My sister-in-law is from there."

I had no idea that mustard greens could spark such myraid topics, insipid as they may be. Clearly, the Moroccan vacation overshadowed my friend's mustard greens.

I can't help but turn to the adorable analogy employed by this service: namely the twittering and tweeting of birds on a wire. Birds sing for a variety of reasons and in order to communicate with their fellows, as do human "twitterers". Sometimes birds call out sheerly in the hopes of finding some friends to sit on the wire with. Twittering seems to be much the same...the birds probably make more sense though.

Along with the nutritious mustard greens and some other stellar veggies, we got a wonderful bottle of wine from upstate NY too. Tweet that!