Hook: Twittering might be for the narcissistic or imprisoned, but I just think it’s plain fun.

Like my twitter? It’s supposed to tell you what I’m doing/thinking at all times. It’s nice because it reestablishes the hand turkey as the talk bubble of jr dot com. And it might cut back on unnecessary blogging if I can just give you a 140-character update instead (probably not, though).

The downside? The interactive one, wherein you could write me back, is too wide for my sidebar, so it’s going to be very one-sided and probably won’t make sense most of the time if I’m responding to someone else on Twitter (use the arrow on the bottom to scroll through previous twitters).

What is Twitter, you may wonder? It’s just a program with a box where you post, in 140 characters or less, what it is you’re doing. Isn’t that refreshingly narcissistic?

But wait, I actually read a story where a student journalist and his translator were thrown into jail by authorities while in Egypt. Rather than be cut off from any help, he sent a last minute text message from his cell phone (yes, you can do that) to his twitter, and people back in the U.S. got him consular support. His translator wasn’t so lucky, but he’s trying to get him help too. That may seem extreme, but I wouldn’t put it past me to get myself in a jam and then have my only lifeline be – the – Twitter.

So if one day you see on my Twitter status “AIDEZ-MOI S’IL VOUS PLAIT!,” you should gather that I am in a French Guianan penal colony along the lines of Ile du Diable in Papillon.