Tag: Twitter

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Dad doesn’t do The Twitter

I know, I know, I’ve been neglecting the blog again. That’s in part because Dad’s in the hospital again. He’s been in and out for a total of about 30 days since mid-November. As you can imagine, he’s getting tired of the place.

They readmitted Dad most recently because he wasn’t getting better since he left. He was still having trouble breathing, he was still retaining a lot of fluid, he was still in a-fib. The doctors thought that some of it would get better on its own; it didn’t. We waited for almost two weeks, which was really longer than we should have. When someone gets to the top of a long staircase and has to take a five-minute break to catch his breath… he didn’t want to go back, but knew he had to.

Among all of the other stuff they were pumping into Dad’s body, one was a medication that would hopefully get his heart back in sync. It was still beating way too fast and way too ineffectively. The heart normally works at about 50% efficiency, whereas Dad’s was somewhere in the 35-40% range. Much like other medications, this stuff didn’t work well enough, so they had to resort to cardioversion.

Basically, they put an electrode on his chest, one on his back and send a mild electric pulse through his body to shock his heart back into rhythm. When it was time to get him hooked up, Mom and I went to the visitors’ lounge to wait. Twenty minutes later, a doctor came in to tell us they were done. We walked into the room, I looked at the machine showing his heart rate and it had dropped from 99 to 69.

So now Dad is going for longer walks through the hospital and isn’t getting as winded as before, but he’s still retaining a lot of fluid. Not as much, but still a lot. Consequently, he’s still at the hospital and getting bored out of his mind. Go figure. He doesn’t like watching TV, he’s not a big reader, so most of what he does is sit around. He gets to talk to the occasional visitor and the nursing staff when they’re in the room, but there’s still a lot of sitting and not doing much.

A couple days ago, Mom and I were walking back to his room with him and a physical therapist. We were talking about things that might keep him busy and the therapist suggested getting him a Twitter account. I thought that would be a fun idea, but he was stuck in the hospital. What would he tweet about? So a few minutes later, I started thinking of some things and sent them out via my own Twitter account:

We just thought about getting my dad a Twitter account to keep him busy in the hospital, but what would he write?
Day 11: Still chillin’ in my recliner.
Thank God I have a toilet in my room, these new diuretics don’t give me much warning before I have to pee!
I’m the mayor of the Cardiac Rehab Unit on Foursquare!
Chillin’ in my recliner AGAIN.
Just got a sponge bath. Life is good.
Why does the food here taste so nasty?!?! Oh, wait, that’s right, it’s hospital food.
I’d kill for a nurse’s pair of scrubs right now. It’s way too breezy downstairs when I stand up.
I think my butt is starting to conform to the shape of my recliner seat.
If I was the big bad wolf, I’d huff and I’d puff and then I’d have to sit down to catch my breath.
#whatdohashtagsdo?
I love my wife very much. No, she didn’t steal my phone to pretend I wrote that. Thanks for being here for me.
Do I get a sticker for hitting the 2-liter mark for peeing today? This new diuretic is REALLY working.
Ok, so maybe there ARE a lot of things Dad could tweet if he felt so inspired…

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Exposed in The Glass House

Apparently, I managed to sneak another 30 seconds into my 15 minutes of reality TV fame. The Glass House has a live web feed that runs for a couple hours after the show airs on Mondays, then one hour on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I wasn’t watching it today, so when I got a call from my friend Marie this afternoon, I was completely shocked to hear that I was a topic of conversation during their live broadcast.

A little twist the producers developed for the show is its social media presence. People vote online for different stuff, but there are also a bunch of Twitter hash tags they’re using so you can contact the contestants and/or producers. One of those hash tags is #AskThePlayers—during each live feed, one or two questions are chosen online by the viewers and presented by Ori (a faceless voice that gives instructions, reveals the results of online polling and occasionally drinks during the live feeds… she said so herself).

When #AskThePlayers first started, I tweeted a question about if the contestants could have any super power, what would it be and why? You know, one of those things I didn’t take very seriously, but thought, “What the hell, why not?” As it turned out, the producers took the question more seriously than I did because that was their question today. (If you want to go straight to the question, skip ahead to minute 43. If you want to see a Tom Cruise impersonator who looks kinda like Tom Cruise and kinda like Edward Norton, start from the beginning.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc779nYpOM8&list=UUNPnv5zxz-CXdQITiNkjoLA&index=1&feature=plcp

Ori said the audience was voting on two questions and the first one was mine. After she introduced both, Steph asked what the name from the first one was. I make a point to conceal my identity on Twitter as much as possible, so my username is @shawnbakken. (I think my favorite part of that whole exchange was how Ori did a decent job of pronouncing my name the first time, but when Steph asked her to repeat it, Ori mispronounced “Shawn”. Yep, definitely drinking on the job.)

When Steph realized it was me, she started getting excited, everyone was asking if I was a friend and she told them that I was in Mensa and on Season 1 of Beauty and the Geek. Steph was waving at the camera to say hi, but of course, they still had to tally the results of the online poll. (The consensus of the contestants was to talk about super powers, but those damn audience members…) After a long, quiet moment—very long and very quiet—my username and question popped up on a giant TV screen. Stephanie found it particularly awesome, which made two of us, and eventually all of the girls started saying hi to me on a live web feed. Yep, definitely awesome.

Sad to say, Steph messed up when she gave her answer. The superpower she wanted was telekinesis so she could levitate, move stuff around and… read minds. She wanted to go all “Jean Grey” on it (a character from Marvel Comics also known as Marvel Girl and Phoenix), but Jean Grey’s mental abilities include telepathy, the ability to read minds. Yay for comic books, boo for stumbling over super powers!

Once everyone had answered their questions, a bunch of people said thanks again, the big gay guy said “I love Mensa, too!”, the big black guy said “I’m not gonna flirt with you, but I’ll say ‘What’s up?'”, some of the girls were happy to flirt with me… yep, definitely awesome. And I missed it. Thank God for someone posting the clip on YouTube or I would have been reeeeeeally depressed.

And remember what I said about the social media presence? Earlier tonight, there were two tweets from The Glass House with my name on them: one was a shout-out from Steph; the other was a thank you from Joy, a girl who’s posed in Playboy six times (and was also happy to flirt with me). Lemme tell ya, seeing my name on a live web feed today was a pretty cool thirty seconds of fame, but after reading tweets like theirs, those thirty seconds seem way cooler.
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Addendum: In retrospect, I want to mention something about Erica since her “super power” was to be a tween vampire so she’d have great skin, sparkle in the sunlight, etc. I imagine this elicited one of two responses from home viewers: “She likes Twilight!” or “What kind of a crappy answer is that?” Combining said crappy answer with the stuffed cat that she carries all over the place, she seems like kind of a ditzy blond who isn’t really a threat to anyone on the show, which is exactly what she wants you to think.

According to her bio on The Glass House’s website, Erica graduated from Ohio State with a 4.0 GPA, worked in finance for three years, got good grades in law school before dropping out at the beginning of her second year… she’s a smart girl. Really smart.

Alex said he was going to try to be the most evil reality TV star ever before getting kicked out of the house. Apparently, his interpretation of “evil reality TV star” was to be a major dick to everyone, meaning he should have done some research about reality TV beforehand. No, the best evil people are quiet, work behind the scenes and are very manipulative. Kinda like… what Erica is doing. I’m not trying to say that she’s going to become more malicious over time, just noting that her super power should have been something more like a master of disguise.

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No more WordPress Tweeter

As much fun as it is to say “I’ve been posting tweets”, when I look back at the last three months and the ratio between “Here’s a funny statement” and “New Post”… I don’t even want to do the math.

Consider this example: Christiano Ronaldo plays soccer for Real Madrid. He’s fast, lots of good moves, scores a bunch of goals. He also falls down a lot. Sometimes he gets fouled; sometimes he gets bumped, falls down, then starts demanding that the ref should have blown the whistle. He’s a skilled player and he’s a whiner. (I think that’s one reason why I find this World Cup commercial from Nike very fitting.)

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBZtHAVvslQ&feature=channel_video_title[/tube]

I don’t think this is an economic equation like supply and demand, but I find there’s an inverse relationship between volume and scale: the more frequently you do something, the less significance it has each time. If you whine whenever you get bumped, the ref isn’t going to listen to you. If you only yell when you’re rolling around on the turf, bleeding from several orifices, people will call the ambulance a lot sooner.

Maybe that example is a bit extreme, but when I see that list of “New Post”, “New Post”, “New Post”, “New Post”, something funny, “New Post”… a majority of the tweets in the last three months have been irrelevant and boring (unless it leads you to read the blog posts, of course). So I’m done with WordPress Tweeter for a while. The frequency of my tweets may slow to a crawl or possibly dry up altogether, but at least you’ll know that when I have 140 characters of material to write, it’ll be more worthy of reading. And I hope for my sake that there won’t be any rolling around on the turf or bleeding orifices involved.

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Books In Your Pants

Someone started this up on Twitter and I had a little too much free time on my hands…

The Dark Tower In Your Pants
The Secret In Your Pants
Genius In Your Pants (which I dedicated to someone)
Much Ado About Nothing In Your Pants
The Fountainhead In Your Pants
Big Trouble In Your Pants
Catch-22 In Your Pants
Life, The Universe and Everything In Your Pants
Napalm & Silly Putty In Your Pants
Desperation In Your Pants
Moby Dick In Your Pants (too easy, but I wrote it anyway)
The Sound And The Fury In Your Pants
The Turn Of The Screw In Your Pants
Something Wicked This Way Comes In Your Pants
Inferno In Your Pants
The Divine Comedy In Your Pants
I Rant, Therefore I Am In Your Pants