Protip: Do not play around with hippos. Art by Netlizard.
At 27 years old, Paul Templer was swallowed by a hippo.
In 1996, Templer was giving a tour of the Zambezi river in Africa when his canoe was overturned. As Templer paddled out to rescue a fellow guide, he was swallowed by a rude hippopotamus.
Templer documented the incident in an article written for The Guardian in May 2013. Templer writes:
I reached over to grab his outstretched hand but as our fingers were about to touch, I was engulfed in darkness…I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs…My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo’s snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.
…I’ve no idea how long we stayed under – time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.
After having a book about the experience published in 2012 (ironically titled What’s Left Of Me), he thought that his nightmare with the “rogue hippo”, as he calls it, was over.
A nice little video about the evolution of the Twitter, which is 6.942 bazillion times better than the Book of Face, which will one day go the way of MySpace — and not even powers of Justin the Timberlake will be able to save Zuckerberg’s baby.
I’d throw another “which” in there, but it’d just be piling on.
Also: What is the ONE THING you would delete about the Twitter, aside from nuking direct messages from orbit?
Also-also: What is the ONE THING you would add to the Twitter?
Also-cubed: Here’s a link to I THREW IT ON THE GROUND, because (a) it includes the lyric, “Happy birthday to the ground” and (b) it’s one of the funniest music videos in forever, with (c) a song that’s actually good.
CAPOTEX – A vintage 1960s designer drug. Unlike most other banned literary substances, this drug is often used by fiction writers and non-fiction writers alike. Artificially increases prose style and sophistication. May cause speech patterns to be affected. Known to induce cutting, witty remarks in some test subjects. Long-term use can lead to literary irrelevance.
SPILLAGRA – Boosts literary testosterone levels. Known side effects include involvement with femme fatales, consumption of rye whiskey in dive bars, and over-reliance on colorful similes. If hard-boiled dialogue persists for over four hours, contact a doctor immediately.
ORWELLBUTRIN – Regulates and encourages the production of dystopamine in the brain. Developed as a means of social control, but now listed as a “doubleplus ungood” substance by the Ministry of Health. In rare cases, subjects may imagine that they can hear animals talking. Should only be taken after the clocks strike thirteen.
It is official: social media now dominates the Series of Tubes.
Every year, these smart people produce a slick video about the interwebs, and this year’s video is especially good and interesting.
Now, having filled your brain with facts and numbers and industrial euro-pop dance music, WHAT DO WE DO?
Simple. We change the world.
Change # 1: One Contact Thing to rule them all
So you’ve got contacts in your gmail at home and Outlook at work, Twitter lists of followers and all kinds of Facebook friends, Tumblr buddies and Pinterest pals and a dozen other things.
It is an unholy mess.
Blessed be the app that gives us One Contact Thing, a single shebang with the magical powers to organize all your contacts, from all those stupid platforms, in one tidy place. The power will be unthinkable.
This means ending the nonsense about Instagram not talking to Twitter because she saw him flirting with Google or whatever. And yes, we need it to be easy and quick and on our phones. Because I’m not firing up the PC every time I need to look up a phone number or Twitter handle.
Whoever does this first — Apple, Google, Microsoft, some dude in his basement coding the app in his pajamas — will rule the interwebs forever and ever.
Change # 2: Obliterate voice mail and switch to texting
Am I saying we should take voice mail behind the barn and shoot it? No. I’m saying take it behind the barn, hang it, set it on fire, THEN shoot it.
Nobody likes voice mail. Nobody.
Don’t call my cell phone and make me dial up voice mail, punch in a password I keep forgetting, then listen for two minutes. Especially when 99.99 percent of all voice mail messages are things you can sum up in a short text like, “Phone tag, you’re it” or “Pick up some milk, yo” or “I’m a reclusive billionaire with $400 million sitting around, and instead of handing it to Karl Rove, who I wouldn’t trust at this point to run a successful race for student body president at Willapa Valley Junior High, I’d like some return on my investment.”
Send a text, people. College kids these days don’t even use email anymore. They think email is so 1994.
If it’s too complicated for a text, send an email.
If you really hate me, send a voice mail. Make it long. Don’t leave your number or email — assume that I’ve memorized it. And then when I call back, make sure you don’t answer your phone so I can start the whole thing rolling with a voice mail of my own.
Therefore, we will nuke voice mail from orbit, and the world will rejoice.
Change # 3: Real photos, good bios and no anonymous trolls
Twitter, Facebook and every other social media shebang is full of photos and bios of people that may be human, and might be young or old, male or female, con artist or genius.
You can’t tell, though, because (a) their profile photo is a shot of a cat, Yoda holding a lightsaber or a pile of leaves, (b) their Twittter handle is @jkringer392 and (c) their bio is a train wreck of obscure references to Star Trek fan fiction and such. I have seen all of these things and more. Who will pay for my therapy?
There are plenty of places for anonymous folks to say whatever they like. Sites like reddit will always be around. Have at it.
HOWEVER: papers of news, TV stations and serious blogs need to stop feeding the trolls by letting TrailerParkNinja and TexasMustSecede2016! dominate the comment sections with anonymous spam and hateful, nonsense. So let’s cut back on that by requiring commenters to use real photos and bios. Want to spew? Go spew in Anonymous Land.
If you’re going to be on the Series of Tubes, and want to be taken Seriously, you need a Serious photo — of you, not your cat — and a real bio. Period.
Long ago, only famous people needed public relations folks, who made sure actors, authors and other celebrities had good mug shots and nice bios. Today, everybody is online. Your photo, bio and name are what people see first. But average people don’t have a publicist. They’re flying in the dark with a blindfold, and yeah, it shows.
Wonder why you aren’t getting many followers on Twitter or hits to your blog? Take a look at your photo and bio.
Trying to get a job / book deal / punk rock music contract? Take a hard look at what people see, in the first five seconds, when they check you out on Twitter and the Book of Face and such.
People don’t make a decision about you after reading your short stories or listening to three mp3s of sample songs on your blog. They glance at your photo and decide, in half a second, whether to interact with you or never give you a second thought. They do this all the time, in a hurry. Ten people just followed you on Twitter, and you follow back or not, clicking away with your mousity mouse, no-no-yes-no-yes-yes-no. You don’t ponder these decisions, right? Bam. So make it easy on people by taking it seriously. I’m talking to you, Miss Duckface, who shot your profile photo in the bathroom mirror using an iPhone.
A duckface collage or montage or whatever.
People need a place –a Profile Doctor–to get easy and quick help with this sort of thing, without putting a public relations firm on retainer.
As an experiment, I just did a bit of profile doctoring for Lauren the Palazzo, recent public relations grad. Did she get a job? Yes, she did.
Yet I can’t doctor the profiles of all 3 billion people with profile photos of their cat, Spock or Darth Vader paired with a train-wreck bios, not unless I quit my job and hire a crack legion of minions with red pens and Photoshop skills. Though if such a crack legion of secret editing agents existed, it’s a good bet that the underground headquarters would include tiger sharks (lasers optional) swimming in the moat and komodo dragons next to the BBQ pit.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
Every day, you see stories wailing about the death of journalism, about newspapers shedding jobs or closing their doors.
So is journalism dead? Or is it a phoenix, dwindling close to the end of its life points only to come back bigger, faster and stronger?
The rise of citizen-journalists
A big part of the revival of journalism will involve citizen-journalists. Billions of people around the world are now portable news production studios, with every iPhone and Droid giving them the power to shoot photos or video and share breaking news with the world.
The negative side of this trend is quality control. Journalists have editors. There’s no editing involved with hitting the share button on your phone, leading to the very possibility of words, photos and video that simply stink up the joint, and wouldn’t have seen the light of day at a newspaper or TV station.
There’s also the problem of sorting through a sea of random stories, blog posts, Tumblr pages and YouTube videos about breaking news, all with similar taglines and descriptions.
Yet those negatives are outweighed by the positives. Giving any citizen the power to document events and break news can only be good news for transparency and fairness and bad news for censorship and oppression.
Quality control
As far as journalism’s overall quality, the milk’s gone bad–a little bit. The carton says it expired yesterday but you might still be able to drink it.
There used to be a 24-hour news cycle, back when newspapers got printed once a day. Blogs, Twitter and the Series of Tubes have made the old 24-hour news cycle as relevant as your dad’s collection of eight-track Meatloaf tapes.
Now there’s pressure to break news all day and all night, even when there’s not really any news to break. Added pressure for sports reporters covering the NFL to search for a scoop of raisins in the Raisin Bran when there aren’t any raisins to be found because it’s the off season.
With more pro athletes, actors, politicians and celebrities using Twitter and other means to break their own news, the pressure to produce has never been greater.
That pressure eventually reduces quality. It’s hard to do a big investigative story when you’re trying to crank out three blog posts a day while tweeting and replying to Facebook comments. The pressure to produce can lead journalists to begin poking and prodding when there is nothing to be poked and prodded, or to focus on the newest shiny object or controversy, whether that controversy has merit or not. Conflict is news.
White noise
Don Delillo’s nightmare from White Noise could be coming true. Soon enough, we will be speaking TV-glish instead of English and having difficulty distinguishing theWalking Dead on AMC from theWalking Dead on TMZ, the people who are famous for being famous — the Snookies, Paris Hiltons and Kim Kardashians of world.
Snooki and other passing media obsessions will fade away. Journalism, though, will rise like the Phoenix.
Despite Jersey Shore still being on TV for one last season, there is still lingering hope for journalism and civilization.
There’s a misconception that people aren’t reading as much these days. Not true. People may not be subscribing to newspapers, but that’s because they’re reading those same stories online. And it’s wrong to think content needs to be dumbed down to attract readers. Not to start a conspiracy thread but it is partially the marketing ploys of the media which perpetuate this kind of thinking. For example, you never see Neil deGrasse Tyson on Dancing with the Stars or plastered on a bottle of soda pop, but that doesn’t mean we don’t, as consumers, want to see that. What we see commercialized in everyday life can be misleading.
People want substance, and they’re getting it wherever they can. The Economist could not be denser and meatier, yet circulation of it is skyrocketing while fluffier magazines like Newsweek are going online-only.
While the way we get our news is shifting from paper and broadcast to the Series of Tubes, there’s a growing demand — not less demand — for good content.
Journalism will adapt, evolve and eventually thrive because it’s the only way to feed that demand, that hunger in every person to find out what’s going on in their neighborhood, their state, their country and the world.
Give us the who, what, when, where and why. Show us men landing on the moon and women becoming presidents. And yes, tell us about celebrities, but only if you’re breaking the news that Snooki is going away forever.
Alex Corey
Alex Corey is a writer studying journalism at California State University-Northridge and a staff reporter for the bilingual El Nuevo Sol. He can be reached on Twitter @ptyjournalist and on the Series of Tubes at ptyjournalist.wordpress.com
My silly blog is now one year old, meaning it doesn’t just crawl anymore.
No. It can (a) get to its feet by grabbing the couch, (b) chase teh kitteh all over the living room, (c) scribble all over the first page of any book with a red pen and (d) make sarcastic faces at really bad movies.
So thank you, dear reader, for faithfully reading posts, writing insanely witty comments and talking smack to me on the Twitter.
I never expected this little blog to have 4,300 hits in a day (Saturday), 11,000 followers on the Twitter or 100,000-whatever hits in its first year of life.
Did you expect that? NO. Me neither.
My expectations were rather low. This blog-like substance was born out of fun, and to try out a bunch of things on WordPress and the Twitter.
What should happen next, in Year Two?
You tell me. I’m taking requests.
Inch on a little closer to me and whisper, softly, your most evil of evil plans.
What over-rated novel deserves to have Page 1 ripped apart by a red pen of doom?
Which movies or TV shows needs to be put on the table and dissected to see how it works so beautifully, or doesn’t work at all?
What insane music videos need to be shown to the world, with the lyrics translated into English?
Or should we just go all-in with zombies, zombies and, just for variety, more zombies?
Everything goes better with zombies.
Vote in the little poll below, or post your idea in the comment section. And thanks again.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
There is no guaranteed method, no secret way, to make a blog post that causes the Series of Tubes to explode.
Anybody who says otherwise is a lying liar full of lying liaosity.
Because this is an art, not a science.
HOWEVER: There are things that are smart, and give you a chance.
If your magical blog post causes the Series of Tubes to blow up like a Death Star orbiting the second moon of Yavin, then Yoda will celebrate by dropping it like it’s hot.
5) Swing for the fences
If all your blog posts are kinda the same — the same topic, the same length, the same tone — it’s a good bet none of them will ever magically shock the world.
Learn from PETA, which gets gobs and gobs of free ink and airtime by trying bold, crazy PR stunts.
Most of them fail. Sometimes, they get a little bad press for a stunt gone wrong.
But they keep swinging for the fences, because there is no real penalty for swinging and missing. Continue reading →
So, I love the Twitter, which is fun and useful, and have fallen out of love with the Book of Face, because it’s not very useful and has become rather Annoying.
HOWEVER: There are things in Twitter that should be fixed, and features we desperately need to have.
Here they are.
Thing Number 4: Kill direct messages
Kill it with fire. Nuke it from orbit. Go send Keanu Reeve through the Matrix to wipe DM’s from the face of the Twitterverse.
Why?
Because nobody sends them anymore, not unless they get hacked and spit out endless “U didn’t see them tapping u? http://spam.a.licious” messages.
Thing Number 3: Give unto us some LIVE CHAT already
One of the great things about Gmail is you can see your contacts on the left side of the screen, with little green dots for folks who are online, and with a single click, bam, you can live-chat your buddies.
Twitter needs this. You’re already on the Twitter, and so is your buddy, but after the third round of back-and-forth of Tweets and replies, it’s beyond clunky and you just want to do a live chat instead of waiting for Twitter to reload and such.
Live chat isn’t some kind of advanced alien technology. Make your people happy. After you put a dagger in the heart of spammy direct messages, give us live chat, which is spam proof.
Right now, Twitter gives us a single stream of tweets, and they fly by at the speed of light.
Even if you’ve got all your people categorized into separate lists and groups, and would like to check on folks that way, Twitter won’t let you.
Basically, they’ve crossed the streams. And crossing the streams is an achy breaky bad mistakey.
Sure, you can fire up Hootesuite and other apps that will let you see different streams of Tweets, as they are meant to be seen. Yet if you need Hootesuite to check different streams, then Social Bro to manage your lists, Buffer to schedule tweets and some other app to get a handle on all your contacts, that’s a flashing neon light that says Twitter needs fixing.
Thing Number 1: Give us easy ways to manage our peoples
Learn from email, please. It’s been around for a little while now, and we all know how to use it.
Don’t let us organize people into lists like “Thriller authors” and “Serious fans of Care Bear cartoons” without giving us an easy way of sending a tweet about Lee Child‘s latest novel only to those thriller authors, and not your Care Bear maniacs.
Don’t make it insanely difficult to sort through the list of people you follow, or who follow you, without wading through screen after screen. SocialBro has some really smart features, like sorting through people who haven’t tweeted in six months. Learn from that. Sock it to us.
It shouldn’t be insanely difficult to keep track of your favorite people. Gmail has a nice touch where it’ll list your 20-some most frequently emailed folks. Those are your people, right? Make it easy for users. Show everybody who tweets them the most, or retweets what they say. Don’t make us try to remember whether you spell it @batmanFANinLondon or @BATMANfanInLONDON when you’re trying to talk to the guy about what DC will do with the Justice League movie.
Also, distribution lists are smart and useful. Let us have them.
Make it easy and we will love you even more, Twitter.
Make it hard and we’ll keep on kludging together workarounds, using four other apps, as we wonder whether you’ll keep making smart decisions or follow Facebook down the path of the Dark Side, where stock options only head south after the IPO.
"In my insomniacal Twitter meanderings I find the miracle of @speechwriterguy. Follow him. He makes energetic sense about words. And life."
@CharlesCrawford / Oxford area, England / Former British Ambassador turned speechwriter, writer, mediator, trainer, blogger. Founder member of ADRg Ambassadors LLP
"Informative, funny, blunt & quirky, @speechwriterguy 's blog is a must if you really give a damn about language & communication."
@DavidWeedmark / Ottawa, Canada / Acclaimed poet & novelist with a penchant for dark roast coffee; passionately curious.
