Ummm… please don’t tell anyone, but I’m on Twitter.
Don’t worry, I hardly ever tweet and have nowhere near the 20-thousand-plus updates like some people I know only via blogging, so my well-entrenched social media avoidance disorder is still intact.
But the other day I somehow realised while playing around on the Twitter directory wefollow.com that with a click of a button I could actually follow Yoko Ono, so I am now doing so.
Since Yoko doesn’t update her status regularly, I soon forgot I was following Ms. Ono. But then, as if in a dream I’d won a lottery I hadn’t even played, the next day I received this bold-faced line in my email inbox:
You have a direct message from Yoko Ono
Yoko, I really, really appreciated your sending me your direct message of Peace, love and understanding. It filled me with great joy to know that despite the asymmetric nature of our budding relationship – you – famous billionaire, me – almost famous wage slave – for the mini-micro-nanosecond that your automatically generated packets flitted down the intratubularities, your message was from you to me and for me alone.
It kind of made me feel like the guy who must have felt while saying, as you tweeted not long ago:
“May I shake hands with the hand that shook hands with John Lennon?”
So in honour of my status as Yoko Ono Twitter follower number 15,482, may I now re-write the song that you must have sung with John Lennon?
By the way, did you know that on that horrible day in December, 1980 when he was so tragically taken from us, I was on a traveller’s high, bouncing from wadi to beach camp in the Sinai desert on a jeep excursion? That we didn’t find out about it until nearly a week later when on our return to Eilat we overheard some people in a bar at the next table shaking their heads about it all while Imagine played in the background?
I’m not famous, so you wouldn’t know that.
Anyway, Yoko. Just…
Imagine there’s no Twitter
If it won’t make you cry
No breakfast updates
To make us all ask why
Imagine all the people
Living off the Net
Imagine there’s no blogging
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to post or download
And no viruses too
Imagine all the spammers
Boiled alive in grease
You may say I’m a Luddite
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll log off
Go outside and have some fun
Imagine there’s no MacBooks
I wonder if you can
No need for feeds or iPhones
Or upgrading your LAN
Imagine sharing music
By trading old vinyl…
You may say I’m on Twitter
Pointless updates one-by-one
I just signed up to join the crowd
And realise it’s not much fun
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
Very funny! Can’t wait to read some fake news, I’ve been starved for that lately.
And here I came round to send you this http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=PN2HAroA12w only to find you partying among the heathens. Somehow I think you’ll still get a good laugh.
Thanks for posting that, Jennifer! There’s a lot of truth wrapped around the funny stuff there.
So now we find out you are also a talented song writer! Good one, Ian!
If Yoko Ono had married Sonny Bono she’d be Yoko Ono Bono.
I tried twitter for a few weeks last spring and bailed out. Beware! It’s a slippery slope!
Liked you post, am thinking about tweeting it about…
she shook john lennon’s hand? I think she shook a lot more than just that…..
Nurse, I was thinking the same thing all along…
… but couldn’t figure out a way to put it without sounding, uh… disrespectful? I mean, what if the lady herself actually responds?
1984-87 I worked at IBM, where we had our internal company network, and could send emails to each other. I worked out a script I called nmsg that allowed you to send a one line message to a user – converting the line to an email, and sending it. Saved a lot of steps. But I imagine the idea of sending one line short messages to people will not really catch on.
Great song text, by the way. Will you break it up into single lines and send it in twitter?
I was once on a BA flight from New York to London with Yoko Ono. I noticed her on the tarmac bus.
(If I twittered, I guess that would be twitterable.)
One use for Twitter:
Twitturgy – Religious Tweeting
http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/
Sounds like the perfect way to avoid those long-winded sermons without leaving the church altogether. Glad I don’t have to make the choice.
“Imagine all the spammers
Boiled alive in grease”
If only …
Does being on Twitter make one a twit?
I decided to set aside my prejudices. I tried. I followed your links. I read the tweets. I looked at who was tweeting and how to follow them. I looked into the terms of service. I thought about my life, and what my tweets (twitters?) would look like:
9:36 sanding
10:15: sanding some more
11:15 saw a duck
11:16 yelled at a duck
11:17 washed off duck poop
11:20 sanded some more
You get the point. And besides that, I can’t even make heads or tails of other people’s tweets. Left in the dust, I am, while civilization marches on. Ah, well. It’s still a great song!
sanding is a more honourable occupation that twittering, shoreacres
nursemyra ~ however honourable, the truth is that after the sanding comes the varnishing, which is always great fun. Apparently, twittering leads only to more twittering.
Scraping off duck poop beats them all.
Awww. Ian has a celebrity crush.
You are so cute.
It’s true I’ve always admired older women. But 27 years older, not so much.
On a recent trip to the UK I had the misfortune to land at the John Lennon International Airport in Liverpool.
I ended up (while waiting more than an hour for my suitcase) humming “Imagine this were a NICE airport” to myself.
What a dump. Poor guy… of all the places to get named after you!
If it’s worse than Luton, God help them. What a dump!
lol … I loved the re-write of Imagine – no twitter is easy for me to imagine. I can’t remember the last time I had the time to waste my time doing nothing there.
I need a little help Yoko. I am Michael Teague Taylor going under the secret identity of Michael Taylor as a CHRIST WITHIN CHRIST WITHIN CHRIST WITHIN CHRIST SACRED ARCHITECT AS SACRED HEART. EVERYTHING COULD HAPPEN AT THIS POINT INCLUDING IN THE CHURCH. WE ARE WORKING ON SOMETHING FOR A LIFETIME AND THESE THINGS TAKE TIME, BUT IT IS TIME. IT IS TIME TO MEET UP ONE AFTERNOON IF YOUR HUSBAND WILL LET YOU HERE IN CHARLESTON, SC. THIS IS VERY URGENT AND I HAVE BICUSPID VALVES ALIKE CHRIST. I HAVE A BIRTHMARKING ALIKE SACRED HEART THAT IS AN INVERTED CYST BUT I SLIPPED THROUGH THE DOOR AT MY BIRTH AND THANK THE LORD IT WAS NOT REMOVED AT BIRTH. WE HAVE BEEN THINKING THIS OUR WHOLE LIFE AND I KNOW YOU KNOW ME FROM THE ZEN MOTHERS. CALL ME ANYTIME AT 843-670-5309 AND I WILL CONTINUE TO CONTACT YOU ONLINE. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH AND I THINK WE REALLY HAVE SOMETHING HERE AND MAYBE YOU COULD HELP ME GET SOMEWHERE. WE LOVE YOU AMEN STOMIE@aol.com I WOULD LIKE TO MEET SOME OF YOUR KIDS LOVE. SACRED HEART AS MICHAEL
Do-do-do-do
Normally I don’t publish spam, but yours was especially funny, so what the hell.
you are too funny!!!!!! Good spirit,,,,,,,,,,,,
Your blog makes me……
Shabbat Shalom
Freddy de Freitas