William Shatner
I admit I never liked William Shatner. Maybe not until the last five or seven years. Part of my dislike of him was linked to my mother. I used to egg her on, because she was such a Star Trek: TOS fan, and I was a hardboiled young TNG fan — about the same age as Wil Wheaton when he started the show — with no patience for bad acting and bad sets. Though inexplicably, I was and still am a huge fan of original Doctor Who. I remember irritating my mom to no end when we went to see the last Star Trek movie she would ever see: Generations. James T. Kirk died and I laughed and laughed. Maybe if I’d known that my mother was going to just a couple of months after that movie came out, I wouldn’t have been as mean.
Back to Shatner: he just grew on me. I can’t explain why. Falling in love with Has Been might have had something to do with it. I don’t know. But I love him a little more each time I see him in something. Each time he pokes fun at himself. Each time he says Denny Crane.
I love this man, many warts and all.
So I’m really entertained to see what appears to be a continuing, sporadic segment on Conan, Shatner doing poetry readings of Twitter entries, most recently of Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby daddy.
I want to thank William Shatner for the decades of entertainment, and for making my entire week. Thanks also to Conan.
That is all.
I’ve been seeing a lot of this humor poking fun at Twitter lately. I wonder if it signifies a growing disillusionment with the service.
I don’t know if it’s a disillusionment, necessarily, but rather a snobbery stemming from the quite-right belief that most people post utter garbage on Twitter and sound like twits doing it, too.
I’m not exempt from that category.
What I do think is that Twitter can be useful, but that everyone has jumped on this big bandwagon. I’m really tired of self-styled social marketing entrepreneurs. What they’re actually expert in is driving links and promoting themselves, and I find that a bit boring at the very least. I’ve stopped following people because I thought they were overly self-aggrandizing. I often won’t follow people if they only post top 10 lists on how to get more followers or how to promote your blog.
I get promoting. I’m just not particularly interested. I have nothing interesting to say, and unlike most of the other tweeters, I can recognize that. And I do it anyway.