Friday, March 11, 2011

Enter the Twit

Misconceptions as a Kid
Kids are awesome. They make assumptions based on the natural world that can border on the line of bizarre. Here are some gems I had as a child:

Remember the old TV show Wonder Woman?  It featured Lynda Carter as a tight-suited, secretarial type. When trouble arose, she changed into the most magnificent superhero. Superman kept his superoutfit buried underneath his business suit. Batman went down the BatPole and changed on the way down. Not Wonder Woman. She spun in circles in any public arena, and in a flash of light, magically her clothes fell off and were replaced with the scantily clad outfit of a villain fighter. I thought, as a pre-pubescent, that if I focused hard enough, I can actually see the change. I mean, Lynda Carter had it all. All over tan. Great hair. Golden Lasso. Bullet repelling bracelets. And, from a young boy's point of view, the best pair of boo__s. (Insert a 't', please). No amount of focus proved successful, regardless of the number of attempts at seeing through the flash.

Also, as a kid, I was afraid of growing up in my own Peter Pan sort of way. I noticed that there were no adults that liked cartoons. How was that possible? Was there something in their food or a law against adults watching cartoons? Did I have to replace Tom and Jerry with golf? Or Nascar? Or worse, football? That sucked. I wanted no part of that. Fortunately it was a total misconception. Now that I'm some sort of adult, I don't have to watch golf, Nascar, nor football. I still get to watch cartoons. Crisis averted.

Fact checking
Sadly, Tom and Jerry is not often played on any of the super-cheap cable stations I'm willing to pipe into my house. If it were, I'd watch. How else could you get me to listen to classical music? I do get Fox. Which means the Simpsons. Daily. The half hour between 6:30-7:00 is my TV time. If you are not a fan, you should try it again. The writing and content is far more intelligent than anything that I could spew. On an old episode, I heard the following "They have the internet on computers now," -Homer Simpson.

I'm not stupid enough to accept everything I hear, especially on the Simpsons. I did some research. Sure enough, I Googled 'internet' and low and behold, Homer was right. The internet has migrated to computers. It must have happened overnight.

After playing around, I noticed that the Internet has everything. Dietary advice. Money solutions. Teaching materials. Something called a blog (not sure if there's more than one at this time). Wow! Why hadn't someone told me this before? A word of caution, tread warily (OK, technically 2 words). Do a search for just about any woman's name and all kinds of freaky stuff shows up. I was a little embarrassed when I searched for Lynda Carter for the picture above (in case anyone didn't have a clue as to who she was). Sure, some of my 11 year old dreams may have been answered but at the expense of my innocence, which I will never get back.

I am a Twit
After learning about this Internet thing, I called a meeting of all vested interests in TriBanter Enterprises, Inc (copyright pending). The main objective of the meeting was to identify how better to take advantage of the Internet. The meeting was grueling and if anyone has any suggestions on how to make a brainstorming meeting less arduous, please let me know. Here were some of the thoughts tossed out:
  • Take over the internet and require TriBanter be read before accessing any other website
  • Replace 'http://' with 'TriBanter://'
  • Develop a new web browser, call it TriBanter, with the goal of ousting Google. Users will now Banter something instead of Google it.
  • Re-program the internet so that all websites will automatically re-route to TriBanter after 35 seconds
  • Rename the internet the Banternet
These were the only ideas that were plausible. As you could guess, most of these options would require a lot more capital than is currently generated. Alternate solutions were needed. One of the attendees, maybe Pondering, suggested that I join something called Twitter. I asked how much? She said, "Nothing." Since that number matched my sponsor revenue and was easier than any one the other offers on the table, I signed up. Therefore, I have joined the other Twits out there (Is that the proper term for someone on Twitter? I couldn't find that information anywhere on their website.) Anyone with a Twitter account can now follow me. Can you guess my profile name? Hint: Ah, never mind. If you couldn't figure out the TriBanter's twitter name, I probably don't deserve you as a follower.

My biggest goal in Twitter is to keep myself motivated in my 40 Days of Working Out campaign. I started on Wednesday like a thoroughbred in Louisville with 2.5 hours of training out of the required 30 minutes. On Thursday, I only accomplished a 60 minute bike followed by a 5 mile run (:38 minutes). I'm currently on day 3 and going strong. Thirty-eight more days should be a piece of cake. We'll see where the Twit goes from there.

2 comments:

  1. Good luck on the rest of the 40 days...and thanks for the Wonder Woman flashback...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks. At this point, day 4, I'm 10% done. More updates to follow.

    ReplyDelete