Lovecraft on Twitter

by Pa Rock
Fan of Good Literature

H.P. Lovecraft is my second favorite American writer. Tim Macy of Kansas City is first, Michael Chabon is third, Mark Twain is fourth, and the top five is rounded out by Kurt Vonnegut.

Lovecraft published his stories in pulp magazines in the 1920's and 30's, sometimes for as little as a penny a word. He took the concept of horror fiction that had been practiced so well by Edgar Allen Poe, and took it places that Poe could never have contemplated - creating a world that is unmistakably Lovecraftian. From the dank halls of Miskatonic University where a fragile copy of the evil Necronomicon was housed in the school's library, to the ice fields of Antarctica, to the falling down houses of Providence, Rhode Island, in the early days of the twentieth century, Lovecraft created mysterious worlds that were truly gateways to terror.

The works of H.P. Lovecraft are an acquired taste, and once a mind has experienced his disquieting tales, it will forever know tremors of trepidation at every chance encounter, every coincidence, and every surprise that presents itself onto the quiet tranquility of day-to-day life.

I began using a tracking site on July 23rd of this year to get some sense of who was reading The Ramble and the types of things that drew people to the site. The runaway favorite post has been "Lovecraft Words," a piece that ran on June 14th, 2008, and examined the beautiful vocabulary that Lovecraft used in one of his short stories. That post has had 48 hits in less than two months, almost double the number of visitors to the second most popular piece - "The Lumley Vampire," which ran on May 31st, 2009, and has only recently outdistanced the third placeholder "The Sad Ballad of Randy Leach," a column on a Kansas mystery that was featured in The Ramble on April 16, 2008, and has been viewed 23 times since the tracking service went into effect in July.

I learned yesterday that there is a new twitter site dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft. I am hopeful that it proves to be an effective medium for reaching the fans of this prolific and amazing author. The site is LovecraftNews@Twitter.com. It is just getting up and running.

If you are on Twitter and have an interest in H.P. Lovecraft, check it out and become a follower.

Short and Sweet - Must be a Tweet!

by Pa Rock
Tweeter

I have always been a whistler. I don’t know why, but I suppose that whistling is a just a nervous habit that I acquired at some critical juncture in my life. Over the years, it has occasionally proven useful – like when I was a high school principal wandering the halls. My whistling would alert misbehaving students of my imminent approach and give them time to clean up their act and hide the evidence. Anything that I didn’t catch made their lives better as well as my own! I remember when one particular class graduated – probably thirty years ago – Cindy Stanley, a favorite student of mine, wrote in the school newspaper that what she would miss most about high school was Mr. Macy whistling in the halls.

It’s so great to have a legacy!

But this posting isn’t about whistling, it is about tweeting. While whistling involves expelling air across the tongue, teeth, and lips, tweeting is the act of excreting thoughts through the fingertips and onto the keyboard. Whistling may go on for hours, but a tweet lasts no more than 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation.

Tweeting, if you are still behind the cyber curve, is the fine are of posting very short messages, observations, quotes, threats, or obscenities on your homepage at Twitter.com. It is similar to posting on Facebook or MySpace, but does not involve the use of passwords or any passive pressure to get cutsie or creative with the appearance of your page. It is much more user friendly, to me at least, than its two knuckle-dragging older cousins.

I am not very adventuresome when it comes to the Internet. I use the google like an encyclopedia to look things up, email for corresponding with a few close friends and my children, and news sites for keeping up with local and world events. A year-and-a-half ago I discovered blogging, and that hobby, as evidenced by The Ramble, has gotten totally out of control.

I had heard about “twittering” or “tweeting” around and about. I knew that Ashton Kutcher had some big contest going with CNN to show that he could attract more followers than them, but I had no idea how one became a follower - nor did I have a desire to do so. I also heard that the turmoil in Iran after their recent presidential election was being fomented on Twitter, but again, I had no idea how to follow that activity except through regular news sources.

I got into this mess on the morning of June 28th while I was catching up on the Internet news. It was then that I came upon a reference to a tidbit that Senator Claire McCaskill (Missouri’s good senator) had had apparently tweeted to her followers. To read her exact words, I had to hit a link to Twitter.com. Once there, I was directed to register before I could pull up her comment. The process of registering was quick and painless. When I submitted my email password, I was given a list of my email contacts who were on Twitter. I checked each of their sites to see what they were discussing, and became a “follower” of most of them.

Being someone’s follower on Twitter is not like being a follower of Charles Manson (well, not usually), it just means that when that person posts a tweet, it appears on your home page. If nine people that you are following each tweet twice during the day, you have eighteen small messages to catch up on at the end of the day. Any tweets that I type to onto my homepage and are also distributed to anyone who is bored enough with their life to be one of my followers.

So far I am following ten individuals. Nine are friends who are also following me, and the tenth is an Hispanic poet whom I admire. Thirty-two people are following me – Allah knows why – and many of those seem to have an agenda that involves selling me something. This group of strangers appears to use the “search” function on Twitter, and then start following people whose tweets contain words related to their products. For instance, one evening I mentioned insulin in a tweet, and soon had three new followers who all had something going in the diabetes field.

Another evening I made a brief comment about Scroungy Bastard, the neighborhood cat that is adopting me. Within minutes Ted Danson’s Cat, Mittens, was following me on Twitter! Mittens lives in Ted's laundry basket.

The thing that I like best about tweeting is the challenge of saying something profound in just one-hundred-and-forty spaces. I am a fan of word games, crossword puzzles, and structured poetry, so I find the limitations of the tweet very appealing. It’s sort of like a haiku rest stop on the information highway.

If I’m not at The Ramble, check for me at PaRock@Twitter.com. And if I’m not there, it probably means that me and Scroungy Bastard and Mittens are hiding out somewhere snarfing up some creamed tuna on toast!

Haboobs!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Last night I tweeted (PaRock@Twitter.com) about a serious dust storm that had just raged through the Valley of Hell leaving thousands of homes without power. Good friend Mike Box, a Kansan who once lived in Arizona but got smart, responded with an email discussing the phenomenon of an "haboob" - one of those massive, dangerous dust storms that I had described.

According to Mike, "The haboob is a naturally occurring event in the Arizona Sonoran dessert and the Horn of Africa. Fortunately these things tend to happen during daylight and can be seen coming. The sky takes on a reddish yellowish cast as the storm front approaches. Visibility can drop to zero. If you are traveling in the city and see it coming, pull into a restaurant order a cup of joe and wait it out. On the other hand if you are on I-10 between the Capitol City and Tuscon, then pull over as far as you can off of the road. Then turn off, yes off, your lights and take your foot off the brake."

Mike's rationale for getting off the road and "going dark" was that as the road completely disappears during an event like this, not every driver is smart enough to stop driving. If your tail lights are on, some numb nuts may see them and assume that you are tooling on down the road - right up to the point where he rear ends your car!

Yesterday's was the third "haboob" that I have been through in Arizona. During two I was home and able to sit back and observe, much as one would marvel at a thunder and lightening storm in the Ozarks. But during one of the haboobs I was driving down Litchfield Road, a four-lane thoroughfare in the West Valley. I was almost home and didn't have the good sense to pull over. Tumbleweeds and a couple of lawn chairs flew across my path, but the force of the winds could have easily propelled larger items into the traffic flow - cars, trees, or even people. Getting home quickly is not worth the risk!

So now I must be on the lookout for scorpions, rattlesnakes, and haboobs. Will the list of Arizona terrors never end?

Arizona Gun Stupid

by Pa Rock
Sad Observer

A few days ago I "tweeted" (PaRock@twitter.com) about a couple of Arizona gun stories that had been in the local press that day. One was regarding a five-year-old boy who died as a result of firing a loaded gun that he came across in his home. The other involved a twenty-year-old male who found a pistol in a closet. He pointed the gun toward his head and pulled the trigger to prove to a friend that it wasn't loaded. He was wrong about that - but he did go a long way toward confirming Darwin's theory of evolution. Nature has a way of weeding out the inferior members of a species.

A friend of mine from back in the Ozarks who has a different view on the gun issue tweeted back and suggested that the story of the 5-year-old was an urban legend that occasionally surfaces to discredit gun enthusiasts. I will admit that the story sounded a bit contrived, but it did, in fact, actually occur in rural Maricopa County last Monday. The youth, described by a neighbor as a "sensible little boy," shot himself in the stomach and expired at a local medical center. Other neighbors described the family as "tight-knit and religious."

The doofus who shot himself in the head was in the Queen Creek suburb of Phoenix.

The sources for those stories are:

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/141106

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/141116

Arizona, and particularly the Phoenix area, has an abundance of stories like the two mentioned above. Phoenix, by virtue of it size (the fourth largest urban area in America), is bound to experience a large chunk of personal tragedy. But the odds of gun mishaps are increased dramatically by the continuing efforts of our state legislature to remove any and all restrictions on gun ownership, as well as the local citizenry's determination to handle guns on their own terms. Many see government safety suggestions or regulations - trigger safety locks, for example - as an intrusion into their private lives. It's often a case of "the gummint ain't gonna tell me what I can and cain't do with my guns!"

Until that attitude changes, more parents are going to be finding themselves in the personal hell where the parents of that five-year-old are currently residing.

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys - because evolution will eventually win out.

I'm a Twit!

by Pa Rock
Twitterpated Journalist

After reading Senator McCaskill's tweet on Michael Jackson this morning, I decided to click on the link to the Twitter homepage and see what all of this tweeting fuss is about. I mean, if tweeting can place the repressive government of Iran in peril, it might benefit me to know more about it. I might want to foment my own revolution some day!

It took less than a minute to get registered as a tweeter and to find out which of my email contacts were also registered at Twitter. In the second minute I learned that my daughter had discovered a couple of drunks hosting a yard sale and had scored some really good bargains. News like that really warms a parent's heart!

So, if you happen through the Canarium and hear some bird tweeting off-key, it's probably me. My handle is PaRock.