on Twitter

I rarely Tweet, but enjoy following. (my username is cyrusi.) A nice thing about twitter is that it doesn't hurt to follow someone who doesn't tweet. I follow 23 people, but only a handful actually tweet.

Check out my new book, "The Loneliest Job in the World: A Masturbatory History of the White House." 

(me on twitter)

(Much of the following may be extremely obvious, but I'm late getting on Twitter, so I apologize.)

Tweeting is an exercise in efficiency in two ways:

1) Tweets are limited to 140 characters
2) Clogging up someone's twitter with superfluous tweets will make them stop following you (at least it will make me stop following you)

Not enough kids say, "When I grow up, I wanna be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." 

(me on twitter)

The ideal tweeter for me is @abdoss00. He's a friend with overlapping interests and a responsible tweeter. He seems to care about his followers.

So who is this Tony Montana character people constantly say I remind them of? 

(me on twitter)

@vmh is similar, but tweets far less frequently and his can be a bit more nuanced. (five score updates on a high school football game, and then nothing for two weeks.)

The worst kind of tweeter is @SalmanRushdie. I thought he'd be fun to follow, but instead of writing great sentences, his tweets are 98% self promotion. (After one of the recent mass shootings, he spat out 20+ tweets on gun control, but other than that he's pretty worthless.) In Rushdie's defense, he is the established celebrity who uses Twitter as a platform to tell his die hard fans where they can see more of him (and to frequently pat himself on the back.) He's just not interested in using twitter as a platform for his art, and I respect that.

95% of convention speeches are based on the assumption that swing voters are clueless about the limits of presidential power. 

(me on twitter)

But then there are other people who are trying to gain celebrity through twitter, so they stick to writing original tweets and can be fun to follow. Like @GaryJanetti. I think he's a TV writer, but he takes on a kind of assholish persona that's pretty hilarious.

I think I'm finally going to make the switch from gmail to hotmail. 

(me on twitter)

@mikepolkjr is hilarious, but rarely tweets.  @rickygervais is funny (surprise, surprise), but might overload your twitter page. In the last four hours he's tweeted 18 times.

Check out my op-ed in the Wall St. Journal, "Sperm is life: The case for criminalizing male masturbation." 

(me on twitter)

Every 20 tweets or so I'll get a sponsored tweet from some company promoting their product, but they put an orange checkbox under the tweet so it's clear that it's sponsored and I don't have to waste my time reading it. (so it makes me wonder how they'll make money.)

I'm excited about the new Scottish restaurant that opened a few blocks from my apartment: "McDonald's"

(what I'm about to tweet)