Hidden Depths

It struck me that I haven't done a tweet compendium blog post for a long time.

How are my tenses in that sentence?

Should it have struck me that I hadn't done a tweet compendium, or does is strike me that I haven't?

It's not important. Time was invented by fat cats in top hats as a way to sell pendula. Tenses are equally meaningless.

It turns out that I haven't done one since the end of last year. This is mainly because I haven't done much tweeting beyond pimping my blog posts and my jams. This twit-lull seems to be a permanent thing.

But I have done a few actual tweets. And I'm always on the look-out for content. So I'll compile the tweets of 2013 here. If there aren't enough of them, I might extend this post by analysing each of them in far too much detail.

I give my readers what they want. Nobody has said anything about not wanting that.

So buckle up for another edition of:

Thinly-Scraped Japes

(tweets in blue, analysis in black)

***

I'm starting this year as I mean to go off.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  It's difficult to imagine now, but this was topical then. I think I meant "go off" in the expired food sense, rather than the firecracker one.]

***

I can only be friends with people who are exactly as attractive as I am.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I added in the italics, which I couldn't do on Twitter. This is an excellent tweet because it compels my friends to contemplate their own attractiveness in relation to mine. I wager that a lot of them immediately felt offended, insulting me by proxy. And now they feel bad.

Anyway, this tweet is factually accurate.]

***

Most tweets ending "True story." aren't really stories.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  A seemingly dull tweet, until you realise that the basic version would be saying that they "aren't really true". It's the word "stories" that makes this so effective.]

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"You are!" "No, YOU are!" "No, YOU are!" "YOU are! *giggle*" - Me and my therapist discussing which of us is the most anxious.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  This has a lot of faults, but there's so much going on in the tweet that you get bamboozled into thinking it makes sense.]

***

Spend the afternoon tagging wine glasses in your friends' Facebook photos.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I like tweets that are imperatives. I think this would be a genuinely funny thing to do, provided you could tag them as "wine glass". You might have to create a whole new profile for it, but it would be worth it.]

***

"Today's date is the first of March, nineteen ninety-four" is one of those phrases you just don't hear much anymore.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  A bit mainstream, this one. But you have to throw a few of these out there, just to please the less-discerning follower.]

***

A good plate is always slightly convex. My uncle used to work in the plate industry.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  The content of a tweet is only about 5% of its worth. It's all about the way it's structured. Here, the second sentence could have been put in parentheses. This would have made it unfunny. Similarly, the repetition of the word 'plate' (which was of course avoidable) adds an odd mechanical air to the whole thing. A real triumph of awkward phrasing.]

***

Just in case you missed it earlier, everyone was laughing at your accent.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I think this might be the apex of my "in case you missed it earlier" series of tweets.]

***

I'm already applauding, just on the off-chance that your dog is called Aleister Growley.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Phrase wordplay in an interesting way, and you can get away with something dreadful.]

***

My hips have never met, but I bet they'd get on.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I don't have anything to say about this.]

***

Rollercoaster o'clock. Quarter-to-knifefight. Half-past Space-Olympics. Sex noon. These are exciting times...

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Hard work, but a worthy effort. I may have written about this tweet before. Though a solid conceit, it was fairly bog-standard until I came up with 'sex noon'. That's when the whole thing came together.]

***

I'm not willing to sacrifice anything to get anything. Net gain would be zero. THINK.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  This may take several attempts to understand. Try again.]

***

I'm worried that this giant magnet makes me look needy.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Classic.]

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I find the smell of Endor very ewokative.

***

That's why I don't try to do jokes any more.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Quite.]

***

OK. So I've finally realised that DOB stands for Date Of Birth and not, as I previously thought, Death On Barrival.

[Paul/Editor's Note: Perhaps my pick of the bunch. It makes exactly the right amount of sense.]

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4% of British landfill is made up of the missing ne'er-do-well "v"s.

[Paul/Editor's Note: I try to avoid this level of whimsy, but sometimes it slips out.]

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I spent most of yesterday inventing fictional WereBears. My two favourites were probably 'Stabbz' and 'Murderer'.

[Paul/Editor's Note: True story.]

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I wish people would stop judging me by my trident. I'm a complicated person.

***

You're wearing a shirt. Does that make you King of the Sleeves? No, it doesn't.

[Paul/Editor's Note: These two tweets go together as a pair. They require the reader to fill in the blanks. I might have been asking too much of people.]

***

"Ambulance" is one of only three English words to contain all of the invisible vowels.

[Paul/Editor's Note: I tried several variations of this, including "impossible vowels", "invisible consonants" and various different words. I'm not totally happy with the end result, to be honest.]

***

The subtext of the song 'Puff the Magic Dragon' is dragons have names.


[Paul/Editor's Note: Once again, this is all in the phrasing. Avoided using a catastrophic "that" before posting, and it's a good thing I did.]

***

I'm going to name my cat 'Something'. That way, I can tell people they look like something Something the cat dragged in or something.

[Paul/Editor's Note: Another tweet whose strength lies in the punctuation. Even a comma before the final "or something" would turn this into an ugly mess.]

***

Twenty-three.

That's not too bad.

I'll do this again in six months. I may not have any new tweets by then, but I can always re-analyse these ones.

Times and tastes change. I might be wishing I'd used that comma.