TWITTERING MY LIFE AWAY: I am all a-twitter these days, now that I am on Twitter. I am not sure whether or not if this is a good thing, but I tend to doubt it. Twitter was a nice verb, but now that it is a noun, there might be consequences, most of them unintended and several of them likely to cost me and hundreds of other taxpayers just like me a good-sized chunk of money, as does everything else does nowadays. And what, you may ask, is Twitter and why am I on it? This is a very good question and one for which I wish I had an equally good answer. A friend invited me on and so I went; as with the inestimable Sir John Falstaff, company, villainous company hath been the spoil of me. Twitter, for those of you are not nearly as much of a twit as I appear to be, is a instant messaging service now sweeping the Internet in 140 characters or less. It is, in short, email for those people whose attention span is only slightly shorter than a gnat’s, a classification that includes most, if not all, teenagers, white supremacists, and socioeconomically deprived dyslexic dwarves. There may be less to Twitter than meets the eye, but, frankly, I don’t see how that is possible. Even in a medium that prizes lack of depth, Twitter’s insubstantiality is positively mind-boggling. You could float Noah and the Ark on the slender puddle of piss on this Twittering rock and still have enough room left over for the three men in the tub, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, the owl and the pussycat, and the USS Nimitz to navigate about without fear of colliding with one another. There are many people you could blame for this horrific state of affairs: the Jews, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Mafia, the international Communist conspiracy, and mildly socialistic mayonnaise makers all come immediately to mind, but I prefer to blame Barney the Dinosaur and his mindless slave army of preliterate munchkins. I realize that there is no rhyme or reason to my assigning the blame for Twitter on America’s vast cohort of annoying runny-nosed tots, but if it’s rhyme and reason that you want then I suggest you go look up the collected works of Alexander Pope and get the stuff there; you ain’t getting no rhyme or reason in this neck of the woods, bubba, that’s for damn sure.