Tag: ‘twitter’
November 11, 2012 at 9:24 pm
The scene from the multi home explosion on the southside of Indianapolis. @indystar twitter.com/MattKryger/sta…
— Matt Kryger (@MattKryger) November 11, 2012
For two minutes last night it seemed possible that my mother’s apartment complex had exploded. (It didn’t.) It was midnight. I was checking Twitter. An Indianapolis friend said there had been a loud boom on the south side that people had heard from miles away. I clicked the tweet’s hashtag and discovered that there had been an explosion. A neighborhood was on fire. This is when my inner monologue started chanting, Please don’t be my mom’s place. Please don’t be my mom’s place. Please, please, please, don’t be my mom’s place. Then came the two minutes of not-quite-panic, more like very-heightened-alert, during which I searched for the cross streets of the explosion on Google Maps. (Typing on a smartphone is irritably slow at moments like these.) Finally the map came up and I was relieved that my mother’s place was in no immediate danger.Whew.
Unfortunately for a lot of people, a neighborhood six miles away did explode, [...]
October 12, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Photo by Brad Bethell / by NC-ND 2.0 CC
You don’t always have to see something to know it’s there. You can observe its effects on other objects and deduce its existence. That’s how Neptune and Pluto were discovered, not by direct observation but by the effect their gravity had on the orbits of other stellar objects. Similarly, you don’t have to watch the presidential debates to know they’re happening, you just have to read your Twitter stream. It’s far more entertaining anyway.
I don’t like conflict. I go out of my way to avoid confrontation. Watching two people go head to head about important political issues is not my idea of a fun evening. I can’t even watch The Amazing Race because I get stressed out that my favorite team will miss their flight. Watching Butler compete in the NCAA Tournament two years in a row nearly killed me. I much prefer not caring about sports. The idea of watching a confrontation that will affect whether I’ll be eligible for health insurance in 2014 in any [...]
January 3, 2012 at 7:58 am
I am now a plant person, not by desire but because of my downstairs neighbors and Twitter. My neighbors because they smoke, smoke rises, and flipping the building upside down is not a feasible solution (and would make it really hard to shower). Twitter because @idontlooksick told me plants remove toxins from the air. The funny thing is I Googled “air purifiers” when these people moved in and didn’t get any results regarding plants. Mother Nature really needs to work on her search engine optimization.
Anyone who says that I should have first done radical things like complain to the condo association, seal any cracks in my walls or baseboards, or, God forbid, talk directly to my neighbors about the problem, please know that I have considered those things and done some of them. Also know that I will never, ever solve a problem when I can work around it. It’s a Fulda thing. We avoid conflict at all costs. My Dad once told us he was going on a business trip out of state and [...]
November 14, 2011 at 7:07 am
Does anyone else think of the opening to Full House when they see these houses? Just me?
I don’t remember the last time I hopped. I have bad knees, and hopping subjects them to two or three times the force of my body weight, so I am pretty much anti-hopping these days. Despite that, Friday was dedicated to the Hop On, Hop Off bus tour of San Francisco, with several cool stops in between all the hopping.
I was staying with friends in the Mission area of San Francisco, so I kept singing “Past the Mission” by Tori Amos any time I came or went from their place. I took a public bus past the mission (but not behind the prison tower) to a Hop On stop. I chose this particular bus company because I got a half-off voucher via the Travelzoo mailing list. Their buses come by every 20-30 minutes, and if you have a choice between getting on the double-decker bus or the open-air trolley, get on the trolley. You might think the bus would [...]
September 22, 2011 at 8:17 am
Susan Orlean’s new book about Rin Tin Tin comes out this week and I feel proud. This is odd because I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I doubt Susan Orlean even knows I exist, although she’s retweeted me twice. (Not that I’m counting or anything.) Twitter is actually the reason why I feel so proud of her. She’s been tweeting about the book process for at least a year now, updating her followers throughout as if she were sending us ultrasound photos of her baby as it headed toward birth.
I felt reassured about my own writing habits when she tweeted about avoiding her writing for the day. I shared her excitement when she reported a high word count the next day. I was relieved to learn she didn’t know the proper usage of “toward” or “towards” either. I totally related when she realized something brilliant she wrote yesterday seemed like crap the next day. I was happy for her when she turned in the manuscript, when she finished proofing, and when she first [...]
