I was able to keep up with Twitter during our recent family vacation to Costa Rica — all the hotels had Wi-Fi and the kids' noses were more buried in their screens than my nose was — so I was able to harvest a nice selection of quips for the new Tweet of the Week poll. The winner of the most recent poll was "One day I'll be thankful my daughter is an independent, iron-willed human with an unrelenting strong voice. But not today. Not in this grocery store," by @House_Feminist. Which reminds me that I took some guff recently about the imbalance of tweets written by men vs. tweets written by women in my lists. My response to that is, first, I don't look at who wrote the tweets as I scroll through my feed looking for ones I like, so it's fairly "blind" in that sense. Second, half the time the Twitter handle doesn't reveal the gender of the person behind the account. And, finally, yeah, probably, my sense of humor may skew "male," whatever exactly that is. It would be an interesting high-school science fair experiment for someone to strip all identifiers off a set of tweets in which the gender of the author can be determined, and then to see if men and women rank or rate them differently. C'mon, kids! The curator's choice from this week's poll comes from @LeftOf_Normal, an androgynous handle (the photo suggests the writer is female): "My therapist told me, 'Write letters to the people you hate, and then burn them.' Did that, but now I don't know what to do with the letters." 
While I was on vacation, my list of the top 40 tweets of the year was published. I've guaranteed each reader at least one chuckle, or your subscription fee for this newsletter cheerfully refunded!
 Also while I was away, my annual prediction-review column posted — Epic crystal-ball fail: A look back at how 2017 confounded this would-be seer. Given my record of futility, the question comes up: Why do this? Why try to look ahead through the fog when a monkey with a dart board could do just as well? Because making and later reviewing predictions is simply another way of planting a flag in the present — of taking note of the puzzles that now concern us and looking back with humility at how life has confounded us.
 Upon our return from the tropics — and what a rude arrival that was! — our kids went out to party on New Year's Eve and my wife and I stayed home to watch what is predictably the weirdest, worst hour of Chicago television every year, ABC-7's "Countdown Chicago." We followed the Twitter hashtag and laughed so hard that I had to write Twitter users help douse the dumpster fire of 'Countdown Chicago' for Wednesday's paper. The degree to which the show is deliberately, knowingly campy — crafted with a huge wink to the sober folks at home — and the degree to which it is witlessly excruciating is a mystery I prefer to leave alone. Either way, following the live Twitter commentary, which we did for the first time this year, was delightful, like being in a living room with several dozen of our snarkiest friends. Finally, my weekly plea/reminder to subscribe to The Mincing Rascals on iTunes or wherever fine, free audio podcasts are served. |
