I created a twitter account today.  Seems odd to establish a mechanism by which people can absorb my errant thoughts.  Errant thoughts I equate to sounds that might be made from a BB rattling around in a tuna fish can.  Every once in a while the BB-sized idea gets moving and rattles around in the tuna fish can skull, going "pink, pink, pink" at increasing speed until such time as you rationalize the thought as well formed and go "Brilliant!  I must tell someone."

 In older forms of communication you had to then find a writing instrument, something on which to scratch out the thought, something in which to enclose the thought now on paper, find the address of someone to which to send it, lest you make multiple copies somehow, and then pony up the $0.42 to drop it into a mail box.

Go back far enough and it was an effort to chisel the thought into a cave wall.  Maybe those folks were incredibly more measured in their communication based on the effort it took to express it.  I mean you really "had to wanna" to paraphrase George Carlin in the days of cave wall billboard advertising. 

Now your fingers can fly on the keyboard with a 140 character capacity, and the whole world can tell what's on your BB-sized brain.

So it becomes easy to connect, but with what?  

Waking up and scratching oneself, you might grab the phone to tweet: "I think I want a blueberry pop tart for breakfast." 

 Brushing your teeth you can breathlessly update them with: "Scratch that, I want cornflakes."

 In the kitchen, it can be: "Damn, no milk.  Pop Tarts it is."

And so on.

Now, on the flip side, a Tweet in a crisis can have profound impact.  We saw the value of this communication during the Iran kerfuffle that tragically had broadcast to the world the death of a young female protester.  Iran could not suppress that information.   It truly makes government accountable to the people when the people can get their message out so quickly.

But the power of electronic communication does not have the traditional filter of an ink stained, season editor pushing the cub reporter for more facts idealized in the movie around the Watergate event.  Watergate opened the Pandora's box of investigative journalism in ways that now over reaches into the personal lives of our leaders that are none of our business. 

So this old twit put out a first tweet that simply said: "Trying out a new technology.  Brevity of expression is something I need to figure out anyway."  I likely needed a comma before anyway, but figured it was a waste of a precious character in the 140 limitation of that world.

Next I went to the profile where you can make your tweets available to anyone.  This gave me pause, so I said no at first.  Twitter came back to admonish me for such privacy, so I changed my mind.

I was then pleased to see I had an instant follower, and eagerly clicked to find out who it was.

It was some porn spambot mentioning nude pictures in their profile.

Terrific.  The number one activity on the internet found me in a nanosecond.

I guess "Ooh baby!" can be uttered 14 times and make the 140 character delimiter, but is it really that arousing when the real beauty is looking into the eyes of another?  Cave men might have had that one right all along, although the sales approach of dragging the object of their desire back by the hair to close the deal was likely an obstacle to a lasting relationship.  Thank God for the Mastadons at the door to win the hearts and minds in spite of the approach.

Then again, their hands were likely tired and weak from chiseling love letters on the cave wall, so perhaps it was just all an act to begin with. 

So those were the BB-sized ideas rattling around in my tuna fish can of a brain as I tip toe into the Twitter world.  It could have value for professional networking as well as for musings that find their way to this communication device I have come to value so very much. 

So this old Twit tweeted for the first time.  Care and attention in the form of self filtering will be the order of the day in that medium to preclude from blasting out ill-formed thoughts before the BB has settled back into the tuna fish can comfortably making nary a peep before the fingers hit the keyboard. 

 Perhaps I will take to chiseling rough drafts in stone to return to my roots before deploying them in the new world of instant communication.   

That's a tough call, though.  In cave man years I'm dead, so who knows how long the hands can put up with the punishment? 

An Old Twit Tweets.  Film at 11.