Tactical re-tweet

I got pestered by some mates into joining Twitter, which I duly did being a modern, technomological sort of person, interested in the relatively new phenomena of social media and cyber-gregariousness that now pervades our society like a funny smell you can't decide whether or not you like, encouraging us to become "friends" with people we've met at a bus stop and are unlikely to ever see again.

So, there I was, Twitterised.

Of course, I obeyed the law and became a follower of Stephen Fry, because I believe that's compulsory and there may very well be some sort of penalty for not doing so.

I read other folks tweets. Some were quite good, or informative, or interesting. Most were banal. I played around with it, tweeted a few times, even twittered occasionally.

But I have to confess, I don't really get it.

To me, other social media makes a sort of sense. It's great for sharing photos with far-flung family, of arranging rare nights out, and for generally having a regular natter when otherwise you might only talk to someone every couple of weeks on the phone. It really is quite social.

Twitter seems very . . . one way.

You post a sentence. It gets displayed for a while. You write another one. Done.

And for the number of people that are going to read mine, I'd be better off writing them on a Post-it and sticking them to my fridge door.

I decided to cheat and directed my Facebook statuses (Statees? Stati?) to become tweets, so I look like I'm a dedicated Twitterer, when in fact I only occasionally look at it. This way, Mr Fry's loyalty enforcement officers won't come after me.

I do get notifications when someone new follows me, which is all very well when it's a friend or acquaintance, but most of them seem to be businesses including, strangely, a Japanese Garden centre.

Lately, I have been experiencing a sudden surge of new followers on Twitter. At first this excited me because, suddenly, people were showing that they liked what I was saying and wanted to know more! Coincidentally, they all seemed to be ladies with a penchant for naturism, for their avatar pictures were often bereft of clothing.

Amazingly, Yasmine, Constance, Celeste, Ebony, Sexxy69 and DickLuva all turned out to be less than genuine, and were in fact spamming for business in order to drum up trade for mucky films.

Apart from the copious displays of bare boobs, their expressions should have clued me in. Half closed eyes and slack jaws are, it would seem, the industry standard "look" to demonstrate sexiness, and totally not indicative of an over-enthusiastic lobotomy.

Anyway, I've blocked them on grounds that pictures of naked ladies are actually available on the internet, if you look hard enough.

So I've been told.

And then I promptly got another one. Just before I blocked her, I couldn't help but notice her name.

In such an industry, market research would, one presumes, suggest using an alias that might be judged "sexy", a name to tempt a potential Joe to view your wares, a nom-de-pute if you will. This isn't difficult, as you could just use those ones associated with contemporary screen lovelies, maybe Angelina or Nicole, Kirsten or Eva. No imagination needed.

Here, such market research had obviously passed my new fan by.

Her name was Mildred.

Now, bad as I feel about labelling people, but when I think of someone called Mildred, it isn't in the context of sexual relations. Apologies if your name is Mildred and you're reading this*, but it really doesn't rank high in the annals of eroticism, does it? The image that springs to mind is of someone with removable teeth.

I wonder if you were a chap in the market for some negotiable affection, would you pay less if your lady of the night was called Doris or Edna?

I may be over thinking this.

Initially, writing this made me feel a bit shallow, and possibly sexist against men for not including them in this diatribe. But maybe the opposite is true. Genuine desirability depends on subjective impressions, the recognition of humanity, the identification of (and maybe with) a real person, not just on plastic pertness and a gormless physiognomy, lovely though those attributes must obviously be.

A name is important.

Of course, the popularity of any name changes from one generation to the next, so todays Angelinas will be tomorrows Myrtles, and the height of allure will one day be represented by Maude, Ida and Mildred.

Anyway, with that tangent well and truly offed, I deleted Mildred and exited Twitter for a few weeks. I'm obviously not exploiting it to its full potential, which may be my fault, but I also don't seem to have the urge (or indeed the time) to learn how to.

Ultimately, blogging may have ruined Twitter for me, because why would I want to tweet when I can squawk?

*Although, to be honest, it's not really very likely, is it?

Name that tuna

In order to get things back on track, and to stop veering off into a world of rants and spoof fiction, today I am simply going to blog about names. Not human names though, because commenting on the current fashion of naming your child by randomly stabbing pins into words in magazines is starting to wear thin. I presume that's how it's done anyway. Certainly explains why there are fewer Janets and Peters, and more Marabaya-Chantelles, Rygon-Mullets and Fantavia-Savingsaccounts doing the rounds.

Where was I? Oh yes, names. I was thinking about animals in particular, and I concluded that it doesn't half help when picturing them if they are given a name that is very descriptive, although it does risk being a bit boring. You can be pretty sure the Whale Shark is going to be fairly sizable, and the fact that it's a shark makes it exciting. The Proboscis Monkey is probably not going to have a tiny schnoz and being a monkey is cool, and the giant soft-shelled turtle . . . well, take a guess. Of course, a house mouse is a mouse that lives in a house. Even it's scientific name Mus domesticus means . . .er . . . house mouse. It's not exciting but there you go.

In the old days, adventurous biologists (who were as apt to shoot new species as study them) would have free reign as to what they might call any new animal they came across, and they could use local lingo (e.g. Kangaroo; Macaw), their own highly educated minds (e.g. Hyrax, Ceolacanth) or just randomly choose something daft to see if it would stick (e.g. Aye-aye, Frog).

Biologists are probably running fairly low on original names nowadays, so I expect it's unlikely that there'll be anything as esoteric as a Salamander or Narwhal announced to National Geographic in the near future.

No, all that's left are subdivisions of animals that we already know about, so naming them is less down to imagination or classical education, and more to do with what you're actually looking at. A seahorse from the south pacific, for instance, is likely to be named a South Pacific Seahorse.

Marine biologists are especially good at this, because they're discovering new species all the time, what with us having only explored a fraction of the oceans. They have to be pretty realistic, and a good example of this can be found in aquariums. Or is that aquaria? I was at the Birmingham Sealife Centre just the other day and saw these two signs for denizens of the same tank:


A starfish with all red knobs on it, and a little fish, shaped like a box, that was yellow. Twenty seconds thought by Jacques Costeau's descendants and job done. Simple as that.

Of course some were more cryptic. Take this fishy critter for instance:

I can just imagine the thought process that went into this nomenclature.
"Hey, Jacques, what shall we call this thing with the big eye?"
"Er . . . hang on . . . I'm having an idea . . ."

This makes me sound like a bit of a curmudgeon, but I'm not really having a go at animal names. For every dull name there is a corker. You have the Common Crab versus the Sally Lightfoot Crab, the Pigeon versus the Magnificent Bird of Paradise or the Brown Rat versus the Naked Mole Rat.

My current favourite name of a bird, apart from the obvious and brilliantly named Blue-Footed Booby, is one I saw at the same place as the Wandering Whistling Duck, and it's this:

It's called a Crested Screamer.

Now that's a cool name, and it's descriptive.