Black Olives and Christian Rockers

I’m fairly certain I hate black olives only out of principle.

For years, I have been preaching a black-olive-hate agenda. Every party where pizza was ordered, every casserole completed, I was there with a grimace and a smug remark.

“Black olives are bitter, they ruin the taste of the entire dish and I’m fairly certain they raped my mother,” I would say.

Just recently, though, I was consuming a “cowgirl” pizza from Papa Murphy’s, and I was feeling lazy and apathetic. I decided to leave those damned olives where they lie and consume the pizza regardless. Turns out, they don’t taste so bad. Actually, they made me want to cook in a tin can over an open flame in the middle of the Arizona desert night. I guess I was in flavor country.

And this is when I realized that black olives are an awful lot like Christian-metalcore outing The Devil Wears Prada.

For years now, I have been preaching a TDWP-hate agenda. Every party where someone insisted that “HTML Roolz Dude” was a clever song title, I was there with a grimace and a smug remark.

“No. No it’s not,” I would say. (How foolish was I!)

OK, well, I may still be right about that. (OK, I AM still right about that.) But I think I simply hated them out of principle.

They are a breakdown band. They Auto-Tune the fuck out of their vocals, and it annoys the shit out of me. Or at least it did, in principle.

I was simply too afraid to admit that sometimes I just want to listen to a breakdown band. I would make a “shitty beer” metaphor here, but I don’t drink. I guess it’s similar to searching “hot naked chicks” on Youtube every once and a while, just to see what turns up. You KNOW nothing good will show up. All you’re going to get is a bunch of videos that have been tagged with “hot,” “naked,” and/or “chicks,” but they certainly contain none of the aforementioned. The number one hit will probably be a video of some guy’s dog that can make a noise like a helicopter. You’ll laugh, he’ll laugh, the dog will make war-noises and the 13-year-old boy inside of you will die a little bit.

But sometimes you just have to do something stupid to later better realize when you’re doing something smart.

I read an interview in Alternative Press with Mike Hranica, main vocalist for TDWP, where he stated that, when he joined the band, he loved the name because he thought it was referring to the novel and the social commentary within. Turns out, no one in the band had even read the novel, or even seen the movie for that matter. One of the members just saw the book laying around his mother’s house and thought it sounded cool.

Hranica said he wished they could change the name now, but their label advised against it.

I respect him for that, and therefore, I guess, I respect the band a bit more. And after listening to more of the group, I think he’s a pretty good vocalist.

I mean, in all fairness, it’s similar to the black olive being thrown onto a pizza labeled “cowgirl.” It’s not really the poor olive’s fault that some Aristotle back at the Papa Murphy’s headquarters decided that naming a pizza after a sexual position was the idea of the day.

So sometimes you do things your past self would loathe, and sometimes you join a band with a name that doesn't mean anything. At least you can ironically mock yourself sometime in the future.

But at the end of the day, you took a chance. You held your nose and tried something new, which is something you simply have to do from time to time, even if you only end up hating it out of principle.

Friends, Romans, Twitizens...

Lend me your ears.

"Twitter" was deemed the "Top Word of 2009" by the Global Language Monitor today.

I died a little inside, at first. Wanting to rant and rave about how much I hate Twitter, I went to bbc.com and just did a search for Twitter. I wanted to find something to read to try and wrap my brain around this Twitter idea.

I came upon an article from Time, posted in June of this year, titled "How Twitter Will Change the Way we Live." I scoffed.

However, upon reading it, I understand the points the author made in the name of Tweets. Below is a list of his top 5 reasons why Twitter will change the way we live.

1) Twitter provides an "Open Conversation"
The author uses an example of how he was sitting in a small lecture which had its own Twitter hashtag, that way those in the hall could Tweet about the event in real time, and all posts could be compiled and found via a hashtag search. This sort of act provides a space for long, open conversation.

The same thing happened to me when I attended the Associated Collegiate Press conference in Austin, Texas just a few weeks ago.

The speaker that commencement address stated that he understood why people would constantly be looking down during his speech - they were on Twitter, talking about the event. The event had a hashtag, and so it was easy to post stuff about the event for people to search for.

In the end, though, I couldn't help but wonder - besides for the entertainment of searching through what people thought of the incredibly droll speaker - what good does this serve?

And in the case of the author sitting in a conference of no more than 40 people (when the conference I attended had hundreds if not thousands of people), what was preventing those 40 people from simply talking amongst themselves without Twitter?


2) Twitter represents what some have dubbed the "Super-Fresh Web"
Essentially, this means that, while search engines like Google return the most efficient or best known results, Twitter provides a chronological, live feed. It makes the web "super-fresh," I suppose.

3) From Toasters to Microwaves
Users are constantly updating Twitter by themselves. The addition of the hash, the @ (to tag someone or someone's feed), and the applications for Twitter (on iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.) were all user-created.

4) News, Opinion, Searching, Advertising
Self-explanatory.

5) End-User Innovation
This is essentially the same thing as number 3. The author mentions that many believe America has been ousted by China and India in the field of innovation in the 21st century, but he brings up that America invented Google, Youtube, Facebook, Xbox, Twitter, etc. And while most argue that "inventing a new mouse trap," as he puts it, is true innovation, the author for Time argues that innovation can also come in the form of user innovation. So, again, the user inventions of the hash, @ tagging, etc. are seen as a positive attribute of the age of Twitter.

Terms from this article that offended me:

Twittersphere - a collection of Tweets? a collection of Twitter pages? I don't know.
Twitizens - users of Twitter? Dumb.
Twitterfied - when something becomes like Twitter, I guess.



The issues I have with this analysis and Twitter in general.
While I agree that Twitter provides a fresh place for posting, sharing and reading newsworthy and interesting articles and pieces, I don't believe it's being used to its potential.

An August '09 study found that, from a pool of 2000 random Twitter posts, 40% were found to be "pointless babble," along the lines of "Hey, I'm mowing my lawn," or "Listening to Raffi, lol."

Twitter's purpose is micro-blogging, and the same issue that occurs in blogging occurs in Twitter. When blogs first became big news, the issue became that anyone can have a blog, there is really no efficient way to filter the good from the crap and a lot of it is pointless babble.

The same applies to Twitter. I guess Ashton Kutcher has a million followers, and he promotes non-profits and charitable organizations through his Tweets. These are all great things, and probably a better use of micro-blogging. However, Jim down the street might have a Twitter which he updates every time he changes his kitchen trash liner.

The Time article states that humans find pleasure in reading about the mundane.

"The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask."

I couldn't disagree more. I think we find pleasure in procrastinating and in reading what doesn't matter. That's why Facebook status updates are so consistent and why Facebook invented the "Like" button. You can simply scroll through a million friend status updates, decide which ones you "Like," and commit to this act with no more than one finger and a set of eyes. We're lazy, bored, strung-out, and we don't want to do any real work.

If Twitter users used Twitter at least half of the time to post relevant, interesting or newsworthy facts (either by linking articles or even simply posting a controversial opinion on a matter) it would make Twitter worth the while. Granted, I can't say by the numbers that half of Twitter users don't do this already, but I can only imagine they don't.

We already scroll through shortened news updates on news websites. The link is typically the headline and a small chunk of the lede sentence. This is what Twitter is capable of. Only with Twitter, real people are posting these things - your friends, Jim down the street, your mother and maybe Shaq. People you know are becoming involved with the news, and that is how the future of Twitter should be.

If Twitter continues to be a shriveled social networking site, then it will die in five years. People will move onto the next big thing, and Twitter will be left behind with all this potential.