Saturday, March 3, 2012

It happened one night: Twitter and the Street Hawk Opener!

Today, we've got a couple of new things to discuss.

First of all, I have started to dip my big toe into Twitter.  The water is cold, but I think that I'll eventually get used to it.

My inspiration for signing up to Twitter was the NHL trade deadline day.  If you follow hockey as much as I do then you will know that this year's deadline day was boring to the extreme!  I think that there were a total of 15 trades during the 8 hours of live coverage on TSN.  What that means is that the panels and the reporters and everyone else talked about what might happen all day, and in the end, nothing really happened.  It was, by far, the most boring deadline day in a long time.

For me, the coverage started at 8pm.  So, you can imagine how happy I am that I went to bed at 1am.  At that point there had been 2 trades.  I spent 5 hours following blogs and Twitter and listening to people talk about all of the possibilities.  In the end, I got some sleep.  I woke up to discover that, if I had stayed awake all night, I would have found out that a bunch of boring teams traded a few boring players.  So, for this one night only, I defeated my hockey addiction!  Well, I guess I gave into it for 5 hours, but in the end, I was finally able to draw the line.


In case you missed it, my method for following along included following the blog of my favorite TSN anchor Jay Onrait.  Since there were no trades to speak of, Jay and the rest of us chatted about many things, including great 80's TV shows such as Air Wolf, Knight Rider, and The Littlest Hobo.  I included Street Hawk into the conversation, but got no response.   Here is the trailer for Street Hawk, as show that only lasted 13 episodes, but will last forever in my heart:







The only response I got the whole night was this:



It was nice to get a response, and funny enough, my little prediction turned out to be not that far off.  Jay sure is a funny fellow.  In fact, I am now following him on Twitter.

I'm not sure what my Twitter life will look like between now and the next trade deadline day, but I must admit that it is yet another quick and convenient way to get information.

So far, things look like this:


As you can see, I have yet to "Tweet", but somehow I do have 13 followers!  Who could they be?  Well...


All of my followers are Sexy Spam.  I am now curious to see how many Sexy Spam followers I can get before my first Tweet.  I really have no reason to Tweet, and they have no reason to follow me, so we will see just how long this lasts.

Thus, this me on Twitter.  I am @brettgitzel if you are interested and on there.  I don't even know which of my friends are on Twitter.  Also, I don't really know how to utilize it.  If you have any tips then let me know.

While on Twitter I came across this:


This Linsanity is pretty funny stuff, as I have mentioned before.  So, when I found out that he was getting his own ice cream flavour I thought it was just the next step in this Lincredible story.  Well, as it turns out, I am out of touch with all of the PC rules that have been set in place these days.  

I guess I just don't see what's wrong with making an ice cream withe fortune cookies and lychee in it to honor an American Born Taiwanese basketball player.  In fact, Jeremy was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, which also happens to be where the fortune cookie was introduced to America... by a Japanese guy, no less!  The point?

Well, people call Jeremy Lin a Chinese American, when in fact other people would just call him an American.  Further still, other people would argue that he is just Chinese, when in reality he would be said to have a Taiwan heritage, which as a lot of people know, has been the source of a long running "rightful owner" dispute between China and Taiwan.

I know a Taiwanese lady, who is married to an American, who got hassled at the American border because she wouldn't admit to being Chinese.  He said, "You can't fool me.  You're all Chinese."  Pretty crazy stuff.

Furthermore, most people associate fortune cookies with Chinese food, but Wikipedia seems pretty clear that this Japanese cook introduced them in his Benkyodo bakery over a hundred years ago.  

Obviously, it is difficult to say exactly who Jeremy Lin represents in the NBA.  Ask the billion people I live amongst and they will say he's Chinese.  The argument will never end.  The same could be said for the fortune cookie, but nobody seems to care about it as much.

In conclusion, a little bit of cookie mixed in with lychee swirls sounds delicious!



1 comment:

Magnetic Island Artist Edward Blum. said...

Thanks Bret I just joined twitter, now I know I have sexy spam too. Saw your blog thought I'd have a look. Hope the water warms up. greetings from Australia mate.