Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Celebrity Twitters

As always, I'm a bit late to the Internet phenomenon of the moment. I've already been informed that Tumblr is now the hot new thing. As for Twitter, I'd heard the word spoken many times over the past several months, but hadn't really bothered to look it up. When I finally found out what it was, I frankly had trouble understanding why exactly such a thing existed. The power of the machine at work became recently apparent, when the report of mass layoffs at 1UP.com/EGM had the site's followers turning to terminated employees' Twitter accounts for details, which gave form and faces to the story in the hours immediately following the news.

Of greater interest to me, however, was the discovery that none other than Shaquille O'Neal himself was a prolific Twitterer. Posting as THE_REAL_SHAQ, he apparently started it up to combat a fake Shaq Twitterer. Now he regularly posts banal updates of such barely intelligible, typo-ridden shorthand that it's easy to imagine his gigantic thumbs struggling to hit the right buttons on his phone's keypad. Among other things, he dubs himself "da horse," predicts that Kobe Bryant will be MVP, questions the legality of Kenyon Martin's "big ball jesture, aftamakin a shot," and describes himself as a "now rt now kinda a guy."

The amazing find encouraged me to look for other celebrity Twitters. Fifteen minutes later, I had read enough. While a good number of minor celebrities run Twitters just as useless as Shaq's, few come close in terms of personality. Nevertheless, if anyone else is interested, here's what I found:

President Obama

Jerry Rice

Lance Armstrong


William Shatner

Brent Spiner

LeVar Burton

Wil Wheaton

MC Hammer

John Cleese

David Lynch

Felicia Day from Buffy and Dr. Horrible

Andy Murray, Scottish tennis player, #4 in the world (honestly, his is probably the most entertaining one here, what with his repeated references to something he calls "tennis footie"--quite a welcome contrast to his taciturn demeanor during interviews)

4 comments:

Czardoz said...

"Guess who's wearing cycling shorts out 2 dinner?" That's right: Andy Murray! This is the most banal crap I've come across on the Internet. What is he, missing a chromosome or something?

Czardoz said...

Why on earth does David Lynch litter his Twitter with daily weather reports? I had initially been disgusted with Twitter's potential for unbridled narcissism, but now I see that the real danger is unrestrained irrelevance.

For more misery:

http://www.celebritytweet.com/

Henry said...

I was skeptical about the authenticity of the David Lynch Twitter, but then I clicked on the link to his website and found it full of the same crap. This is surely the nightmare scenario that Fake Colonel Campbell feared.

Czardoz said...

The funniest one by far is the fake Shaq Twitter.

"I’m unemulatable. I took the files and deleted them, ate ‘em, used ‘em in the bathroom, flushed it, went to the sewage plant and blew it up."

"Al Jefferson is going to appear on SportsCenter tonight, in my dunk footage."

If only the real Shaq could live up to this Big Moses.