Suck my tweet

Unless you’ve been locked up in an Austrian basement for the last 24 years you will be at least vaguely aware of Twitter. It’s a microblogging site where fuckwits yap on about the inane meaninglessness of their lives in the futile hope that someone, somewhere out there isn’t too busy guffing about their self to take notice. (This SuperNews! cartoon pretty much sums up my feelings). Fat chance. Unless you’re Stephen Fry, that is.

Stephen Fry gets stuck in a lift and the whole world takes a deep breath. Stephen Fry accidentally posts a picture of a jar of Nutella, the sandwich spread that keeps the cardiology department in Italian hospitals in business, and twitheads fall over themselves to come up with the most vacuous comment.

trinityrs on March 23, 2009
I love nutella!

mongooseson on March 23, 2009
Not my cup of Darjeeling thanks.

GertrudeSusanne on March 23, 2009
Nutella - yummy! If I had been Paddington Bear, that´s what I´d have taken on my journey to the UK :o)) Ta 4 all the great piccies xxx

“I took a massive dump in my brother’s jar LMAO ;-)” I mean it’s not even a giant 5kg tub of the hazelnutty chocolaty goo.


Now that is worth tweeting the fuck out of. (And worryingly, should anything happen to me in the next few months and I become martyred by the 24-hour rolling depression channel that is The News, this is the image of me that will no doubt be seared into the retinas of viewers. In case of emergencies, always keep your kith and kin updated with a fairly recent and decent looking picture of your mug. Thanks Christine.)

Twitter is just too needy. For me, two blog posts in a month is a pretty good figure. I did better than Faith No More, who manged an almost 11 year long gap between posts. But Twitter demands your almost constant attention and I just don’t have that level of commitment. (I notice, for example, very few entries in Barack Obama’s Twitter feed since early Novermber – are you tell me he has something better to do?). “Feed me!” the cute little bird chatters, before pecking out your eyeballs.

My advice: leave the narcissism to the people that have made an artform out of it. I speak, of course, of Russell Brand, a man who would not exist if he fell over in a woods and there was no one there to marvel at/be outraged by him doing it. Here’s just a few snippets from his feed:

"My booky wook is number 6 on the New York Times best seller list. Alas, i want it to be number 1. Please go and intimidate bookshop staff."

Followed by:

"No.1 in the New York Times best seller list is "My Wookie Book" by some arsehole called Chewbacca. We must usurp this illiterate goon."

That and like I couldn’t condense all that down into 160 characters. If you're going to write something that nobody is going to read, at least do it properly.