Facebook's 350 million+ users are being greeted by the dialog below, an "Important... Privacy Announcement" that "simplifies" and "adds" privacy controls:

But like Mark Zuckerberg's "Open Letter" last week, this is just the smiley pro-"privacy" wrapper around the real agenda, which, as Peter Kafka at All Things D wrote, is quite plainly to get you to abandon your privacy. Rival startup Twitter has taught Facebook that there's big growth in public internet sharing.

Thus — Ta Da! — these new default settings, which suggest users share their posts and information with the whole world. From Kafka (click to enlarge):

Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon got similarly liberal suggestions:

To make this scheme a bit more defensible, Facebook will now allow users to set their privacy level — i.e. to reverse the default choices — on a post-by-post basis, a feature long requested by users. Thus, Facebook will become an endless series of privacy decisions and dilemmas. It's enough to make you rush into the open arms of Twitter. Because while microblogging about your lunch might be narcissistic and pointless, it's definitely less narcissistic and pointless than deciding who should get to see the post about what you had for lunch.

Facebook: Asking you questions you don't want to have to answer about content no one cares about. Isn't social networking a joy ride?

We're seeking out the laziest journalists on Twitter. And, yes — irony alert! — we're open to your help. But in the meantime, we've compiled a shortlist of candidates.

Well, actually, no, we didn't so much compile it ourselves as receive it basically whole, over email, from a friendly, fed-up journalist. But we did helpfully copy and paste said tipster's examples, for your benefit, below. This is what it is called the process journalism. Anyway. On to the lazies!

Doug MacMillan (@dmac1), BusinessWeek. Tipster: "When not pimping out his recent BW 'OMG have you seen the iPhone?!' cover story from a few weeks ago, [MacMillan] has taken the time to master the 140-character source request." As you can see below, that's true, although in fairness MacMillan sometimes issues requests on behalf of other lazy reporters. A sampling of his "work:"

Priya Ganapati, Wired (@pgcat): Were the Palm Pre support forums and blogs too hard to navigate, or something?

Jessi Hempel, Fortune (@jessiwrites): Too lazy even to finish typing her full, lazy request.

Jessica Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal (@JVascellaro): At least this is for a conference thing instead of her real job.

Julia Allison, TMI Weekly (@juliaallison): Can't even come up with her own questions. (Not a journalist, you say? Newsweek begs to disagree.)

Associated Press "Climate Pool" (@AP_ClimatePool): What's? With? All? The? Questions? We'll tell you about the climate: The climate is uncertain. If you can figure out how you feel about that, maybe you can contribute to the AP's "collaborative editorial."

Gawker (@gawker): Our tipster didn't point this one out, but you've probably noticed that we, too, try to crowdsource a lot of reporting, and even speculation. Lazy! But at least our headlines are more fun?

Being lazy, we're so done surfing painstakingly around Twitter, looking for further lazy journalists. If you've been doing that, and have come up with some other names, do let us know.

(Top pic by Tony Delgrosso. What, you thought we were going to take it?)

The paper report that videos are being faked — perhaps by the Iranian government — to discredit the would-be-revolutionaries and caricature them in as extremists in the eyes of other Iranians.

A video posted Monday morning on foreign events blog enduringamerica.com, hosted by a University of Birmingham professor, showed someone burning a poster of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, before a crowd of cheering people. Several readers thought the image was suspicious, in part because it didn't show the burning poster and the crowd in the same shot.

It also didn't appear to match other video taken at the university, said Scott Lucas, a professor of foreign policy at the university who started the blog.

It was eventually pulled. The Journal, to its credit, explains the arduous and time-consuming process of getting information out of Iran when authorities are confiscating cellphones and censoring the internet.

...some Iranians pass video from cellphone to cellphone by Bluetooth, which allows for wireless transmission of data. It can eventually go to someone who has access to a reliable Internet connection, such as in a university library or even in government offices, he said.

This sounds significantly more plausible than the reports in June of a widespread 'Twitter revolution'. Apparently fighting a totalitarian government, one far from averse to finding out where you're tweeting from and, you know, killing you, is not as simple as it was painted after the elections in June. The real trouble comes after you write a 140-character message or take video on a camera pen mailed to Iran from the US. Which gives us more cause to support those brave enough to get information out.

Schmidt once dismissed Twitter as a "poor man's email system." But as the microblogging service has picked up more users, more activity and more search traffic, Google has been forced to take it more seriously. Today, Schmidt's engineers announced that Twitter-style "real-time" searching of tweets would be integrated into Google's core search service. I guess that's what you'd call a Poor Man's Real Time Search Engine, mmmm? Whoops.

Even worse, Schmidt's attempt to join Twitter itself proved something of a disaster this morning. He first logged on with the handle "eschmidt0", prompting a cyber-diss from high-profile New York tech executive Anil Dash:

Oh, snap! Surely a big-time CEO wouldn't let a zinger like that get under his skin right?

Except that within a few hours Schmidt had duly changed his handle and moved over his old content:

It looks like Schmidt also received some help from the Poor Man's Email Service's Rich Man's Identity Authenticator, because he's now got a "Verified Account." Throwing his (semi-)celebrity weight around at Twitter Inc.? Schmidt's starting to get the swing of things. Now just tweet about your next lunch choice, Eric. We promise not to mock. Too hard.

The founders of Twitter are the 2009 "Media Person of the Year," according to IWantMedia.com. Their primary accomplishment: inspiring the Twitter song. Congrats, fellas!

Here is a plan to save newspapers, from the German publisher of the biggest daily paper in Europe: You can see links for free, but you pay for all the news content you read on the internet, either per-story or a flat subscription rate. Is not a bad idea! Now just put it into place and make it work before you go bankrupt. That's the trick.


This, then, is the only thing left of Conde Nast's $100 million investment in Portfolio: a repurposed Portfolio.com, with more news you can use, and an owner who "wants it to be a must-read site for small- and medium-size business owners." How declassé!


Last week the Chicago Sun-Times lost a sports columnist to the Chicago Tribune. This week, the Chicago Tribune lost a sports columnist to the Chicago Tribune. Next week, both papers will still be going broke, and all the Chicago sports teams will still be mediocre.

Jack Dorsey is no longer a day-to-day executive at Twitter, but he used to be CEO of the microblogging service and is widely credited with coming up with the idea for brokering 140-character status updates. Those updates, in turn, now carry a large amount of local news and commentary of which papers like the Chronicle, which is losing circulation and money most months, were once the main suppliers.

Which is why it's more than a touch ironic that Dorsey is leasing space in the Chronicle building for his new credit-card processing startup Square. Joining him will be two tech "incubators" that promise to nurture technology as disruptive as Twitter. This is sort of like renting space inside your body for one of those creatures from Alien. It will explode out of your stomach and devour you someday. Look out, Chronicle!

[via BayNewser]

(Pic by Esther Dyson)

That, we admit, is just our shameless, cynical speculation. Facebook wants people to share their content with everyone, like on rival hot-startup Twitter, but most people are content just sharing with their regional networks. So why not kill the regionals and push users to share with the world by default?

Paranoid? Maybe. But this conspiracy theory happens to fit snugly with what facts are known:

• Many users now restrict their content to regional networks like the city in which they live.
  
• Facebook recently introduced a feature allowing people to share their content even more widely, with everyone, Twitter style. But, frustratingly for Facebook, most people don't use this, as TechCrunch points out.
• When it kills the regional networks, Facebook will introduce new privacy "controls that we think will be better for you." Read: "We'll be making decisions of various sorts on your behalf."
  
• Zuckerberg encourages everyone to "read through all your [privacy] options and customize them for yourself." This implies you don't have to do that, if you're comfortable with Facebook's new privacy scheme and whatever default decisions the company has made.
  
• Even if you do customize your privacy settings, Facebook will "suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy." Read: If you're sharing with your regional network, we'll probably suggest you share with the world.

This wouldn't be the first time Facebook ham-fistedly pushed users into oversharing; the social network is still infamous for Beacon, the spammy advertising scheme that automatically sucked up data from outside websites, ruining engagement proposals and holiday gift surprises and eventually prompting a lawsuit. Facebook finally shut the thing off in September.

Unlike Beacon, which users could not opt out of at launch, this new "privacy" scheme will immediately be customizable by users. Zuckerberg has thus avoided a major mistake this time around. What's more, his "open letter" shows a newfound appreciation for the power of PR gestures, even softball PR gestures painfully short on actual details (those will come in the "next couple of weeks," says Zuckerberg).

But, smiley-face posturing aside, users should never forget that Facebook remains, at heart, not a community but a Silicon Valley startup, always hungry for exponential growth and new revenue streams. So be sure to review those new privacy "options," and take Facebook's recommendations with a huge grain of salt.

(Pic: Zuckerberg, by Silverisdead on Flickr)

The whole incident was, naturally, promptly uploaded to YouTube; you can bask in its full matrimonial glory in the clip above. Bride Tracy Park had no idea Hanna was going to do this, according to TechCrunch, which is just as well, since now she can claim innocence in this ultimate monument to techno-narcissism.

At least it was intended as sort of parody. We hope.

"Twitter" is very allegedly the "Top Word of 2009." Runners-up were "Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, and Vampire." The thing all these alleged "Top Word" have in common is that they are not the actual top word for 2009 years running now, "Naked."


Jim Lehrer is getting old. PBS is taking his name out of the title of his news show and changing it to the generic "PBS News Hour." Other newspersons will get more air time on the show, though Lehrer's not retiring yet. This has been your Jim Lehrer news update.


Christine Daniels, the transgendered LA Times sportswriter who committed suicide last weekend, is being remembered mainly as Mike Penner, male, in obituaries. Penner switched his name and byline to 'Christine Daniels' after he became a woman two years ago; last year, he switched his byline back to 'Mike Penner.' I plead ignorance as to the proper etiquette here (though I would imagine it's "Whatever name you want"). Experts, please comment.


Hey, it's a TVNewser holiday party and everyone is invited! And it's at the "Galway Hooker Pub" (code word)? Usually we keep those things a secret. But okay!

UPDATE: Shabooty says it's not true, and that @TheMichaelLohan is in fact an impostor. Here's the email Lohan sent them:

This is not not not me. I do not have and never had a twitter and twitter's corporate office confirms that. My lawyers are investigating.

Adrian and I briefly contemplated dropping everything and rushing to the bridge for the first-ever Gawker night editor suicide intervention to save Michael, but transport to the Brooklyn Bridge from our respective apartments is sort of a bitch, and while we were haggling, @TheMichaelLohan's tweets all disappeared. Here it is before the mass tweletion, from an Allie Is Wired screengrab:

And after:

Twitter hack? Drunk texting? Honest-to-god near-death microblog experience? A few initial points of inquiry:

• 1. If he was en route to the bridge, why did he send the tweets "from Web," suggesting he was seated at his computer, as opposed to on his Blackberry in a car?
• 2. Why would he only say good-bye to Lindsay?
• 3. Can a user delete all their tweets at once without deleting their user page? Their simultaneous disappearance of all of Michael's tweets suggests something more drastic than individual deletions.
• 4. Tweeting a suicidal cry for help must be the most tragic use of 140 characters in the history of human literacy, a floundering grasp at the lonely nothingness that is the artificial comfort of virtual communities. That's not an inquiry, just a point to be made with a sigh.

Were you on the Brooklyn Bridge a little after 2AM? Are you the pipsqueak who hacked Papa Lohan's account? Tell us what you saw or know.

[AllieIsWired] [TheMichaelLohan] [Shabooty]

The New York Times detailed Jenny Sanford's ongoing rise to prosperity through her husband's infidelity. The article is actually a cleverly disguised guide to capitalizing off of your cheating, no good, dirtball politician husband who didn't even care enough to cover his tracks.

Step 1: Book deal. Per the Times: "She is writing a memoir, "Staying True," to be released in April by Ballantine Books, about grappling with her husband's marital infidelity." Not unprecedented by any means, though, granted, Elizabeth Edwards has a slightly higher profile than Ms. Sanford in addition to, you know, cancer. Make sure your book touches on themes of survival and—yes—resilience. Make sure the everywoman can relate to your struggle, even though the reality of your wealth and privilege makes your story otherwise totally inaccessible to most people who've been through what you have. Dina McGreevy definitely did it right, though. I mean, that cover!
Step 2: Trademark that shit. Elizabeth Edwards and Hillary Clinton made a misstep here. Like the old Spaceballs line, moichendising! The Times notes that Jenny Sanford's taking the smart step of trademarking her name, so she can sell "clothing, mugs, 'other household items,' stickers, decals, notepads." I can't wait until Jenny Sanford's Locate-A-Husband GPS Tracker (Now With International Capabilities!) hits stores. She already missed Black Friday, but I've got faith she can get this bad boy out in time for Christmas, so wives may spy on their "bad boys" everywhere.
Step 3: Barbara Walters. Always Barbara Walters. If you don't get your catharsis on with Barbara Walters, you don't get your membership card. And take a guess who made this year's list of Babs' Ten Most Fascinating People. Hint: It's not the transvestite who "peed" on Adam Lambert. Sure, there are other ways to get on TV: if you're Brian Grazer's ex-wife, just rewrite The First Wives' Club as a USA mini-series. But did she make the Times today? Nope.
Step 4: Web Presence. Once you lock down THE_REAL_JENNY_SANFORD, get rid of those pesky fake Twitter accounts, verify your own, set up your own website, and get music recommendations via @ by Questlove, you'll know you've equipped yourself for electronic success. Be viral, be with the people. Or as Miss Sanford would have it: "She has set up a privately financed personal Web site, complete with news releases and photographs." Nice. Silda, we still await your Tweets anxiously, so you can throw down the subtle RT on free throws like this.
Step 5: Get into politics. You've already proven you can deal with both sleazeballs and scandal. Anyone who says you're not ready for politics is clearly a moron. And the best way to start: by endorsing the candidate who's going to win your Pussyhound Husband's position after his constituency gives that tail-chaser the boot. "[Sanford] has endorsed a candidate to succeed her husband, State Representative Nikki Haley, a Republican and the only woman in the race." Just like that, you come off as both a strong feminist and a dedicated party-line driver, setting yourself up for political support further down the road, when you....
Step 6: Run for office. "Genius" is right.

Since late October, @avary has been tweeting regularly about prison life, referring to himself as #34 and regaling his followers with tales that will probably turn into a mindfuck prison thriller screenplay someday, because some people are so irrepressibly hip that even imprisonment for a tragic crime turns all cool and A Clockwork Orange-y in their hands.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian wrote about the wayward Pulp Fiction and Beowulf scribe's stream-of-consciousness Twitter early last week.

But then: Plot twist! Milian's blog post led authorities to realize that Roger Avary wasn't in prison at all. Rather, he had somehow ended up on a work furlough program, which allowed him to hold a day job and merely bunk up at night with fellow furloughees. This is both not the hardscrabble prison life everyone thought @avary was describing, nor the prison sentence Roger Avary was supposed to be serving. So guy got nabbed and they sent him to real prison, prompting @avary to tweet:

LAT is preoccupied with how Avary ended up in furlough instead of jail, but what I want to know is, (1) Was @avary faking his prison badassery, since he was never in prison in the first place? (2) If so, was it a ploy to make us think he is irrepressibly hip and A Clockwork Orange-y? Because that would be pretty lame. (3) Alternately: Is the jailhouse equivalent of a work-study program actually as disgusting and terrifying as I always imagined real prison to be? Meaning @avary wasn't trying to deceive, it's just that we soft-bottomed media folks foolishly assumed that his scary tweets were from the belly of the beast, when in fact they represent a relatively pleasant penal existence, and when @avary gets to real prison it's going to get really crazy.

[LAT] [LAT] [LAT]

Today the La Times reported on Oscar-winning "Pulp Fiction" screenwriter Roger Avary, who is apparently tweeting his way through a year's incarceration for vehicular manslaughter. The main proof that Avary is behind the account: a tweet from sci-fi author Neil Gaiman which reads "My friend @AVARY is tweeting from the inside. It's riveting, horrible strange..." Avary's tweets are indeed all three of these things:

On prison food:

On past-times:

On other kinds of past-times:

Of course you are all familiar with Kari Farrell AKA "The Hipster Grifter", who here tweets about her efforts at becoming the next Eldridge Cleaver:

Kari's not the only tweeting inmate with a literary bent. There's also Prodigy, one half of the 90s hip hop duo Mobb Deep (Prodigy is currently serving 3 1/2 years for firearms offenses):

But don't think all locked up tweeters are common criminals. Some of them are trying to, like, save the trees, man. Like this Rainforest Action Network tweeter who updated after being arrested for illegally hanging a protest banner on a Niagra Falls bridge:

But watch out: Police know how to use Twitter, too!

Some of these hardened twiminals (?) are in prison not for violating state or federal laws, but because they are journalists doing a story, like NPR's Laura Sullivan. Journalists love prisons almost as much as they love Twitter:

And other twitmates (!?) are obviously fake. ("Phil Spector" was the most recent twimposter tweeting from the Twig Twouse.) But we can pretend!

Rapper Daddy Bawsten was positively tickled by his tweet-inducing arrest:

Finally,here is a twitcarcerated (!!!) man named Inv8r who you know really is in jail, since he includes a picture with his tweet:

Trending Topics: #freeinv8r

The most annoying thing about TweetBookz isn't that it's spelled with a Z (which is pretty annoying and should be reserved for Liza), but that it has lowered the bar for the already suspect phenomenon of giving people an analog medium for their digital brilliance. But at least the publishing world does us the favor of finding the best of the bunch to give annoying Twitter-based books. Just like companies that will self-publish anyone's crumby novel for a service fee, now any 14-year-old girl (or the parents of any 14 year-old who think their kid is the Confucius of microblogging) with a keyboard and/or a smart phone can enter the realm of publishing. This is going to be the first thing I write about on @StuffIHate.

TweetBookz only charges $30 for a hardcover and $20 and it is comprised of as few as 40 pages with one tweet on each page or as many as 200 tweets. That's only 10 cents a tweet, which means that is now official market value for these internet outbursts. Thanks, TweetBookz, for placing an amount on them. Now to get a $10,000 advance for the @StuffIHate Twitter book, we're going to have to write write 100,000 dispatches. That's way too much work!

Today, the Times runs a trend(ing) piece in the business section on how Twitter users are making serious cash Tweeting ads. Like, serious cash. How much?

Meet John Chow, a guy who makes money telling people how to make money online with his blog. Basically, imagine an infomercial about making infomercials. That's this guy, who's described as a "blogger and Internet entrepreneur." Watch, he makes money:

Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M's with customized faces, messages and colors...In October, Mr. Chow's income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. "I get paid for pushing a button," he said.

$200 bucks. For telling people about M&Ms. Since the Times doesn't, let's take a look at what that Tweet looked like:

He's got the designation of it being an ad in two characters, four if you count the parenthesis. He puts the designation of it being an ad after he places the link, so visually, your awareness doesn't come into play until you've been given the chance to get to/click on whatever's being sold. And four characters out of 88 comes to about 4.54% of the message. It looks subversive to me, and I know it's an ad, but then again, I'm not dumb enough to follow this guy in the first place.

Yet advertorial content is a time-honored tradition in all kinds of publishing formats! Including this one, where we place "sponsored ads" everywhere. But these look like out-and-out endorsements, followed by the designation of it being an ad. And if you attach them to hashtags and @feeds, you can more or less just harass and molest the flow of information coming in to Twitter. Just like when you could see HOT XX NEKKD AMATEURS being attached to Twitter messages that were coming out of Iran after their elections a few months back, by automatic spam bots. Brilliant.

So: what's the defense for completely subverting and messing with the user experience on Twitter? Enjoy this:

"We don't want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network," said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. "All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us."

Kind of sounds like the way vampires work, right? Once you're done with getting your blood sucked, you become one of them because you need more blood. The reason people left MySpace en masse (besides the fact that Facebook offered a cleaner interface and unanimously better user experience) was because of the gross, nonstop barrage of advertising, which Facebook has thankfully kept to a tolerable minimum. What's to stop your Twitter feed from becoming just one, long, advertisement if the people and trending topics you follow are being turned into ad-vampires left and right? And do people even really care that much?

One problem is that many Internet users eschew the idea of these ads, saying they commercialize authentic dialogue and undermine people's credibility. "It interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience," said Robert Scoble, a technology blogger with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, who says he "unfollows" people on Twitter who send him ads.

Exactly. So who's to blame for all of this, really? When Twitter goes to shit, and like a bad strain of drugs, everything you touch comes from the same gross source lacing it with their nasty advertorial additives? This assclown, snake oil salesman Mr. Ted "The Murphman" Murphy, he of Pay Per Post, a company basically everyone in Silicon Valley regards as straight-up evil.

They're not wrong. Pay Per Post was having users sell other users on products with no disclosure that they were ads. Whoops! The Times article catches up with Murphy, who's now doing Izea. Which is how Julia Allison ended up shilling for Sea World. But Murphy's reformed! He's better now! He knows he made a mistake!

Ted Murphy, the C.E.O. of Izea, now a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially "made a big mistake" by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea's ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers like "#ad" or "#sponsor."

Right. Except, whoops, not all of them:

The Times piece wraps up like so, as they chat with people running Likes.com, which, I don't even care to know what it is, really. All of these people are gross and lecherous. Here:

"We are trying to limit it, to prevent people from losing their following," said Bindu Reddy, a former Google product manager who started the company with her husband, Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google engineer. "We know people are queasy about this."

Right! But probably not as much as Twitter is, or should be. It doesn't appear that they're doing anything to even take a cut of the product being moved under their hood. Amazing that the most money being made on Twitter isn't by Twitter. Their product goes down in value to them because it's becoming an ad network.

But who's even dumb enough to follow Julia Allison and John Chow? Won't they catch on to the con being run on them? Well: the same people who watch bad TV, for one thing. Philo Farnsworth probably thought his invention was going to make the world a way better place, too.

Meanwhile, spambots and assclowns like Ted Murphy's zombie army who're getting small bucks will attach themselves to hashtags and your @feed like leeches. Big brands won't care whether this hurts what people think of their product—however much we want it to, or however marginally it will—because this creates awareness. And to think, it's all because of a guy who likes like Ted Murphy. Look again. Right?

Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy. Unless we can get everyone to do this:

First of all, the only people besides Harvard-Yale grads who have anything invested in this ritual are their hangers-on, asshole bloggers (me), or sports writers, who think they have a really great narrative on their hands by writing the same narrative they do every year. Watch. This year's filing by ESPN, penned by one Mr. Tom Lakin:

It is, after all, the 126th installment of a tradition that began back in 1875 with a 4-0 Harvard win. In the years since that first meeting, the legend of The Game has grown. Perhaps best known is the 1968 contest in which Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie an undefeated and heavily favored Yale squad — a result immortalized in The Harvard Crimson student newspaper by the famous headline "Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29."

In 2008:

Before two of the nation's oldest universities had a field to play on, they were eager to prove which school was superior in the rough-and-tumble new sport of football. Since 1875, the Harvard-Yale rivalry has emerged simply as "The Game."...And with Satuday's tilt at the Yale Bowl the first time since 1968 both Yale and Harvard come into The Game unbeaten in league play, the rivalry game will determine the Ivy title.

And in 2007:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — The current Yale and Harvard players have heard all about the tradition of the venerable rivalry and are preparing to make some history of their own. Meeting No. 124 is Saturday and the stakes are as high as they get with the Ivy League title up for grabs. Both teams enter with 6-0 conference records. The last time that happened was 1968 and Harvard famously rallied from 16 points down in the final 42 seconds to tie Yale, spoiling Yale's perfect season.

So, yeah: basically, the same shit every year. Big old tradition for people who don't normally care about football to care about football. These people don't have time for football! Between all the awesome regattas and going to one of a handful of schools getting a degree from now maybe matters, football's mostly bullshit to them until they own a stake in whatever team is smashing the Bears this week. To the rest of us, it's interesting only if you've really seen Big or The Dark Knight that many times, and there's nothing else to watch on TV. Because the Harvard-Yale game, as far as football goes, sucks. This is not an opinion so much as it is a general consensus.

This young gentlemen seems to think this year's hyperbolic announcing of the Yale-Harvard game might be a bit much.

As in, straight-up stupid. Because, yes, going to a game in New Haven is just like seeing a game anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. You don't need to watch football or sports or even have been to the south to understand this. One palpable difference is: at the Harvard-Yale game, this guy has a better chance at scoring than either of the teams.

Needless to say, the situation in the SEC is slightly different. Like security! At Old Miss, they have issues with people wearing costumes. I mean, sure, Yale has people in "costumes."

But real football games don't mess with things like facepaint, or the asstacular body suit pictured above. Oh no, these guys go all out:

Woah, there, buddy! Went a little over the edge with your sporty spirit, no? Just slightly. KKK guys, showin' up to Old Miss games. At least the Ivy crowd would pick up on this kind of irony, and dress as Marxists, or something. What'd security at the Yale-Harvard game look like today?

OH ZHHOOOZHOOPUPPY.

Yeah, but Ivy Peeps can get hard, too, motherfuckers.

When they're not busy farting out the inevitable air of disappointment over the uninitiated. Observe the sad and sober:

A first-time drinker's disappointment, maybe? Next time we suggest an ether-soaked cloth. Because this isn't exactly the riotous assembly the rest of College Football gets to see every Saturday. Oh no. This is something else. The easily intimidated should gird their loins:

Who's skiing, today, right? The most accurate assessment might come via comparative basis. Granted, your high school football team may not be running world economies, but at least they can run an audible.

There is, however, culture to be had! And Yale-Harvard has a competitive spirit, to be sure. While inflatable bulldogs loom over alumni old and young, the youngest are trying to get drunk enough to black out—but inevitably puking—while rumblings and remembrances of competition not yet had or had too often result in the vicious pejorative shouting of whose school is better. It results in things like this. NSFW, especially if your work has a thing against assholes being incredible assholes and bad apings of The Departed:

And astute observations!

In SECspeak, this translates to EAT SHIT AND DIE YANKEE even though a rival school might only be thirty minutes north of another. Lost in translation, again and again. Other dispatches emerge:

I'm not sure what that means, but then again, I didn't go to Yale. Or Harvard. But I bet it has something to do with the enormous networking opportunities that present themselves at these things. Next year, I'm dressing as this guy and not leaving until I've closed a lower rate on my Visa. Or at least my dry cleaning bill.

But in the end, a winner must emerge. And today's winner was a come-from-behind defeat by Harvard. Let the celebrating begin. With Batman fans:

The Dark Knight would like you to get home safely, you second-rate sissies! A 14-10 victory IN YO FACE. More! The Harvard Law Dean of Students' Twitter Feed would like to feed into your insecurities over and over and over Yalies. Even they gotta get in on the action:

And Yale fans, like any good sports fans, prepare to riot at the failure of their warriors. Cop cars, turned over! Terrible taunting! Emotionally scarring and physically dangerous situations, yes? Yes!

We all have our own private consolations. Because, really, though, all college football ends in the same result, no matter who it is winning, no matter your school, your degree, your color, age, race, sexual orientation, tax bracket, building clearence, byline or birthright, we really truly are all the same when it comes to the endgame of a football victory: some straight-up homoerotic manlove, as fans rush the field.

Granted, these fans won't be getting arrested today, like everyone else's, but then again, they're not tearing down goalposts, either. Hell, they might get to play on "special teams" for an hour or two. A higher, deeper education, indeed. Note the young man in the left-hand corner of the picture, though: he knows, oh yes, he knows the truth of the situation. Yale-Harvard games, like their students, are just different. In the best ways possible.

Balloon Juice's John Cole needs to stop reading Twitter—as do we all—because he finds things like this there:

Now that's a story. If Obama has lost the backing of the man who spent a full year and $346 million trying to prevent him from becoming president, then how can he govern?

And this:

It's an intriguing theory. We're skeptical, but since Kurtz is paid considerable sums by the Post and CNN for his deep knowledge and impeccable instincts when it comes to analyzing the media business, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

In short, Twitter's new slogan reflects the microblogging service's evolution from a venue for self expression into a forum for conversation, according to Welsh linguist David Crystal. Crystal seemed an ideal expert to consult on Twitter's new phrasing: he has written or contributed to more than 100 books on language, including on internet linguistics, and examined the text-messaging culture from which Twitter was born in his most recent work, the appropriately-titled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.

Here is what Crystal emailed us about the significance of Twitter's change in phrasing:

I'm not surprised. Twitter has become steadily more discursive, with people maintaining threads and introducing a great deal more interaction, rather than posting isolated tweets. As a result the focus has shifted from the individual to the group, and a more open question is required to capture this emphasis. What-doing looks inward. What-happening looks outward. It's a natural development, it seems to me.

So Twitter's users have, at the very least, moved beyond mere navel gazing and into arguing. Way to go, narcissists!

(Pic: Crystal, via DavidCrystal.com)

J. Peter Hogan (what is up with Republicans and that first initial?) is a crazy right-wing dude who loves Politico.com and Newsbusters.com. He has too much time on his hands and a strange preoccupation with socialites and other young, attractive famous women, namely Lydia Hearst, her sister Gillian, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and others. He regularly tweets them all random things that make little to no sense. This morning he sent the mini missive, "Pictionary poetry: A socialite looked up "socialism" & didn't like what she found yet stays a prominent person in fashionable society." Huh? That doesn't even make any sense.

Later he followed up with, "@Lhearst @parishilton my dctnry - socialite: a person who is prominent in fashionable society. @danaperino @ladygaga @katyperry." Is that supposed to be a dig or something?

Well, Lydia took the bait and replied. "Some people take things too literally and do not understand how words and definitions can change - they should watch S.Park F Word Episode," she tweets, adding in a second message that her comment was directed towards Hogan. Please, the only two stations this guy knows how to find on his dial are Fox News and QVC, he wouldn't be able to find South Park on Comedy Central with both hands and a flashlight.

Lydia, do not talk to the crazies! They're always going to be there, saying stupid things that don't make any sense, and if you talk back to them, you're going to give them power. And with some power, then they'll keep saying more things and crazier things and they might even do something drastic like show up at the red carpet and heckle you for being a communist because the carpet is red. Twitter is for telling us which parties you're going to, who you're hanging out with, and maybe even sending pictures of the outfits you're wearing. You just keep having a good time and being fabulous and let the professionals worry about shaming the crazy people, OK?

[Image via Getty]