A West Wing wedding...

For those of us who follow the West Wing characters on twitter, yesterday was a lot of fun.

Charlie and Zoey got married in Manchester, New Hampshire. There was much merriment, despite the drama when Donna thought she was going into labour eight weeks early. Overcome with the excitement of it all, Josh forgot about his sensitive system and thought it would be fun to ride one of the Bartlet horses. Not having any clue how to make a horse stop, he then had to be rescued by secret service agents. Meanwhile, Gail the Fish stayed behind in DC and amused herself by swapping round the letters on the keyboards.

They also took the opportunity to highlight a couple of charities that people might want to donate to, in honour of Charlie and Zoey: the National MS Society and Missing Kids.

This morning, they are all hungover and perhaps a little grumpy.

Check out the #bartletyoung2011 hashtag. For those who doubt the reality of it all, there's a photo of Zoey in her wedding dress, and another of CJ and Danny arriving together.

Makes you wonder who these people are, running these accounts, though. Do they not have lives? Are they all separate people? Did they coordinate beforehand? Will Aaron Sorkin give them all jobs in his next show? We can but hope.

3BT: the BBC, Inevitable, and Starbucks

1. I log into the BBC website during my lunchbreak. A banner informs me that it wasn't a vicious rumour: soon we foreigners will be able to access iplayer. Hooray: no more kicking myself because I forgot to record Question Time.

2. Many unexpected backings and kind comments on my book. I even get an email back from an agent saying she 'likes the tone'. It's still a no, but it makes my day.

3. Another tweet, another happy shriek: the Gare Centrale Starbucks is apparently not just a rumour either. It's going to open on 22nd June. I'd been looking for something to use my countdown app on.

Studio 60 arrives on Twitter...

Perfectly timed to coincide with my having just re-watched Studio 60, look what I've just found.

I'll be interested to see how that turns out, and how long it lasts: it's different with the West Wing, where there is always new, real political stuff to talk about, and we know much more about the characters' lives and relationships. But these guys are going to have to come up with their own plotlines, and stay in sync with each other as they do so - no mean feat.

It's about a year since Josh and Donna started the craziness of West Wing roleplay - Donna had been around for a while, but it was no fun till Josh showed up. Since then, virtually every character ever mentioned - including Josh's mum, and Gail the goldfish - have joined.

It looks like Harriet and Jordan still need people to run their twitter accounts. I can recommend it as a very fun sport, but be warned - I've heard it's highly addictive.

On Bradley and Twitter, for possibly not the last time

So, there we have it. Thanks to Jenny Wade, straight from the man himself:

How can you miss me if I don't go away?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Bradley Whitford is not on twitter. He wants us to long for him from a wistful distance. You know, I think even if he were on twitter, I may be able to manage that.

Alphabet tweets

How, I wonder, does a Twitter trending topic start?

I loved last week's #lesserbooks thread, where people suggested titles like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce, The Prunes of Irritation, or Modesty and Open-mindedness. It was a great Friday afternoon chuckle until the spammers got hold of it and clogged the thread. Grrr.

Anyway, who started it? Does anyone know?

And does anyone know how I can start my own? Because here is a game I think we can all play. Today, in the middle of Gent, I mentally updated my Facebook status to "Claire is aching for American adventure". Then I thought - wow, look at that alliteration. Maybe I should go through the alphabet. Creative writing prompt, or something. Mostly, just a bit of fun.

So, if you want to join in, add a comment to this post, or perhaps tweet with the hashtag #alphabettweet... How are you feeling? Your aim is to tell us with at least three words that all start with the same letter, and you're allowed an extra one in there for good measure.

Aching for American Adventure

Buzzing with Belgian Battiness

Crazy about Colin's Co-star

Dreaming of Dating a Dude

Eternally, endlessly elegant (okay, a little poetic licence there...)

Fearful of foreseen failure

Garrulously Googling the Gorgeous Good Guys

Healthily Hopeful about Her Holidays

Inquistive about Important Issues

And all the way to Zzzzzzz .... I'm too tired for this right now. Will finish another day though. Night all.

Oh Claire...and you claim to be a grammarian?

See, that's the thing. I do. I do claim to be a grammarian.


And a good one.


And, when it comes to it, one to whom you would actually want to pay money to help improve your own language skills.

So why can I not work out what is structurally wrong with the following sentence?


"It wasn't me who baited him this time."


(This is quite beside the point, but I feel the appropriate response to this tweet would have been "I am most proud of you for your sudden maturity".)


Now, in the sentence "It wasn't me" - I thought me was a direct object. Whereas in the sentence "I did not bait him", the word I is clearly an subject. Which makes it all very confusing. How can I be a subject and an object at the same time?


But. Once I'd torn myself away from twitter, I practised saying "It was not I who baited him" in a posh British accent (my own) and I have to say, it does have a certain ring of, well, rightness to it.


Somebody called @blabbate quickly picked me up on my subject/object issue, which I had foolishly assumed would silence the critics, dizzying them with all my jargon. But oh, no. @blabbate said:. "Direct objects do not follow linking verbs. Subject complements do. In this case, a predicate nominative. In prescriptive English you must use the nominative case, which is "I". However, a descriptivist will tell you either is fine."


Ha! I would say next. See. We are both right. Even Wikipedia says so.


Except that, like Josh Malina, I *am* a prescriptive grammarian. There are elements of my "descriptive" grammar textbook which make me wince when I am supposed to teach them. Such as the lie that "whom" does not exist anymore. Don't be ridiculous! Of course "whom" exists.


This appeared to be one of those moments, like being twenty-three and having a degree from Cambridge and realising one has been spelling "forty" wrong all one's life. Why did no one ever tell me it wasn't "fourty" till I worked in a bank? (If only that had been the worst mistake I'd made there. But anyway...) Shame on me.


These points, in my defence: And yes, Josh Malina, and yes, Safari spell-check, I do mean defence with a C. We are not all American, you know.


- I was not wholly focused on the task in hand. I was, in fact, teaching a French lesson. But as previously discussed on this blog, I am unable to ignore tweets from certain people, whatever the time of day or night. Still, I do feel a little guilty about this, and I wish I could say it would not happen again.


- I was also a little dizzy with the excitement of being engaged in two of my favourite activities at the same time: grammar, and bantering with Josh Malina.


- We Brits in our 30s did not have any grammatical knowledge imparted to us at school. The reason for which I know some is my Belgian education. This whole "It is me" thing does not apply in French.


In fact, there it is. That's the reason. Mother tongue interference. "C'est moi qui". Never "c'est je qui".


Yet, here I am again, late to bed because of twitter, and standing duly corrected, duly rebuked, duly ashamed. At least now I have a posh-sounding excuse for it.

twitter and sleep deprivation

Tired, tired, so tired.

Which is all Josh Malina's fault.

Well, okay, it's kind of mostly mine. I should have known better than to bait him on twitter regarding his - ahem - favourite West Wing co-star round about the time I was getting ready to sleep. The whole twitterverse promptly climbed on board and suddenly everyone was talking to me, about me, about me and Josh Malina in the same breath. And, he was talking to me.

I'm so tired, I said to my friend this lunchtime. I tried to explain.

"I couldn't turn off twitter when Josh Malina was tweeting me!"

"Why?" she said.

"Because he's famous! A famous person was tweeting me! I couldn't go to bed!"

"Why?" she said again.

And, let's face it, she has a point. I mean, I know why. I understand what goes on in that complicated brain of mine. But still.

Josh Malina is not only famous, he's the very best kind of famous. He's also funny. And he tweets me! Semi regularly! In fact, I have communicated with him this week more than I have with my own mother. (We're not close.)

So kudos to him for interaction with his fans, and making me feel special. (Ahem, somebody please take note.)

But, why? Why does it make me feel special that Josh Malina is tweeting me?

My friend had a point.

He's famous. (Think you've got that by now, though.) He's on the West Wing. He's one degree removed from ... well, you know, he who should probably not be named in the same breath. He's funny. He has 10,000 ish followers on twitter, as against my measly 300ish.

So, if he tweets me, if those tweets to me are mentioned on TV interviews, does that make me somehow famous too?

Somehow important?

Is fame really the same thing as greatness?

And even if it was, is contact with that kind of greatness what gives me my significance, my identity, my greatness?

Didn't think so.

However...

... Twitter can be good for one thing: making new friends.

Seriously.

Real live ones.

Today was the perfect afternoon to spend in a North London park pushing cute children on swings, convincing a little boy to read a story to his apple seeds so the tree would grow faster, and chatting to another aspiring writer about our respective books. Turns out we had so much in common we didn't even talk about the West Wing much at all (apart from a brief "we hate Amy" moment, which are ever helpful to one's sanity). Heck, we don't even know what each other's favourite episodes are. (I sense a blogpost coming on.)

So there you go. Twitter has its uses. The trick, as with all these things, is to make it your servant, not your master. I'll let you know how I get on...

NB This really counts as tomorrow's nablopomo post, since I'll be at a wedding... and separated from my computer and all forms of electronic communication...

NaBloPoMo or the art of drivel

I've just signed up to NaBloPoMo - which is not, as you might think, a hitherto-undiscovered strain of swine flu (or 'flu - hands up if you still write that, and 'cello, and 'phone). It's National Blog Post Month. Or something like that, anyway. And since I've recently decided I need to up my word count if I'm going to stand a chance of ever being able to write this novel anything like as well as I would like to, I've decided to give it a go.

Much like practising the oboe, which seems to bascially consist of making the same mistakes and then some new ones day after day until it all magically falls into place (apparently), if I churn out enough drivel, one day I will write something good.

Lucky you, you get to read the drivel.

I have to admit, I was hoping NaBloPoMo would come up with some kind of Daily Prompter, but all it has is a theme.

This month, the theme is "Big".

Which is lucky, because something "big" happened to me today. Well, it's actually something very tiny, but I am bouncing up and down and unable to concentrate on anything else so well, what better topic for this, my first of this month's thirty blogposts.

Rob Lowe tweeted me!

Rob Lowe!

You know, Sam Seaborn. From the West Wing. That programme I go on about endlessly and have probably mentioned or alluded to in every blogpost since time immemorial.

Sorry, Janel Moloney, but even getting a signed picture of you in the post this week does not trump this. (Though, to clarify: I bounced a little then, too.)

I have to say, I have not been this excited since I got my first tweet from Josh Malina - and then - even more excitingly -a DM from him - then a retweet - and then, oh miracle, he started following me. Goodness knows why - I doubt he enjoys my daily adulation of Bradley Whitford. (They have some kind of rivalry going: it amused me greatly when I spotted a line that Brad made Josh say in a West Wing episode he wrote - "I can't act; I'm a terrible actor." Josh deserves it though - he does things like tear out the last page of books before the person has read them. Ouch.)

And he still hasn't unfollowed me - I know this, thanks to Qwitter, which I don't suggest you sign up for if you have any issues with self-confidence. And who doesn't.

Quite why any of this should be so exciting eludes me. Somewhere in my list of blog posts to be written is the title "fame - the illusion of greatness". There's one to ponder. But first, sleep.

Twitter: the illusion of connectedness

It's a funny thing, this cyber space lark. Possibly even a quirkier place than the strange but endearing country where I find myself living.

A few months ago, I had my first Direct Message on Twitter from a properly famous (and very cool) person. That I was beside myself with excitement goes without saying. That he then re-tweeted me not long after, and THEN started "following" me was further fuel to my cyberglee. That he hasn't unfollowed me since is even more of a miracle. (Especially given my frequent and over-enthusiastic mentions of, gushings over really, one of his major rivals.)

Then there was yesterday. Oh, yesterday.

The person with whom I would most like to communicate is either not on twitter ("I don't tweet on the first date," he once said in an interview - guess there'll have to be more than one date, then) or, more likely, hiding under a false and unguessable name. But I do exchange tweets with several people whom he knows, several with whom he is currently working in fact. And when I say exchange tweets, I mean they actually message me too. This is amazing to me. I don't know why it should be - they are, after all, only people, aren't they? - but there you are, it is.

And yesterday one of them offered to pass on a message for me.

I think.

He may have been joking, but that would be cruel, unspeakably so.

Why should this have me bouncing up and down and unable to concentrate on what was a more than decent Gilmore Girls episode?

It is completely irrational. It is not even as if I have met the guy. I am no closer to the second date after which we would presumably tweet each other directly.

The illusion of connectedness. That's all it is. And yet, surprisingly powerful, intoxicating even.

Go figure.

Belgium does it again!

... and they say nothing interesting ever comes out of this tiny, delightfully quirky country.

Think again, dear readers.

And no, I'm not talking about the deep excitement that is the EU Presidency, delightful though it has been to have Radio Four use it as an excuse to wheel out all the old Belgium jokes. (Here's one of the better ones - "Do you think Belgian officials drive around in cars with Tintin-ed windows?" I admit to chuckling at that one.)

No, ladies and gentleman, this is something far, far more world-changing, more inovative, more - well, words fail me.

Yes, just when you thought life couldn't get any better: Belgium brings you the Twoddler. Yes, now your small child can tweet too.

Though personally as far as Belgian inventions go, I think I favour the saxophone, or those bitter lemon sweet things called the Napoleon.

Source:

http://www.slipperybrick.com/2009/12/twoddler-lets-your-toddler-twitter/