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RIP Amy Winehouse! Also Norway.
I’m an enormous presence on Twitter, what with me constantly tweeting hilarious one-liners, non sequitirs, various other bon mots and insightful observations about anything and everything; re-tweeting this, hash-tagging that, trading witty barbs with other wags, one-upping them, occasionally (but rarely!) being one-upped myself; following tens of thousands of people, and being followed by – no surprise here! – many thousands more. My God, you can’t keep me away. There’s not the tiniest bit of minutia, the most seemingly insignificant detail of my day-to-day life that I would consider too run-of-the-mill, too dull, too mundane to share with the world in 140 characters or less. Hell, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, you surely being one of my aforementioned many followers.
Aside from the personal joy Twitter has afforded me and the ways it’s enriched my life, the site has indeed been a godsend for many other lazy writers as well, especially when they need to file a story, any story, but don’t really want to exert any effort in crafting something themselves. Witness the flurry of articles you’ll see in any given week where the writer – or, really, the compiler – has simply culled a bunch of Tweets on a common theme.
…Did you witness them? Well, you should.
Yesterday I saw no less than three such pieces – yes, right here on the internet! – on a single theme: Celebrities reacting to the death of Amy Winehouse. Now, that’s to be expected – she was famous, she was popular, she made a song sound much more 60s-like than Zooey Deschanel. And Twitter was practically invented for celebrities, so many of which need to be center of attention every waking moment, so given a chance to issue some over-the-top, dramatic, tearful message, the stars came out in droves.
So thank you, Kelly Osbourne, Kim Kardashian, Demi Moore, Ricky Martin, Soleil Moon Frye, Melissa Joan Hart, Ryan Seacrest, Usher, Adam Levine, LA band “Foster the People,” and those of you who I haven’t mentioned – for bravely sharing your feelings about what must have been difficult news to hear.
And yet…I’m still left wondering if perhaps – just perhaps! – Winehouse’s death wasn’t as much of a shock as news of the murder of 77 people in Norway, which none of the above had anything to say about. (To be fair, many of the other celebs in the articles did mention the much more significant tragedy.)
One who apparently is still unaware about Norway’s darkest day – but not about Satanists and the Monsanto Company’s genetically modified seeds – is former Roseanne sitcom star Roseanne. Judging by the number of tweets coming through her account an’ stuff, she’s got little to do all day but dick around with her smartphone an’ junk. She tweeted about Winehouse at least 18 times over a period of about 24 hours, each tweet a little batshit crazier than the last, and then finally ended her ongoing 140-character eulogy with this:
The inclusion of a hashtag advertising her new reality show? Brilliant and tasteful self-promotion! Good to know Roseanne’s as classy as she ever was.
And yet my favorite celebritweets were from a gal named Natasha Bedingfield who I only know of because she has a song they play at my gym all the time that doesn’t annoy me like Zooey’s. Anyway, she originally tweeted…
But let’s give credit where credit is due. She didn’t ignore the horrific events in Oslo: Sometime later, she followed that up with this heartfelt message…
Shouldn’t that have ended with the tag “#insincereafterthought”…?
Ted Parsnips
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