My Three Twitter Crown Jewels

I have a Twitter account. I don't use it very much - I can't say I really 'get' Twitter. But I keep it mostly because it seems like one ought to have a Twitter account. You know, as a social duty I guess.

So anyway, I have three crowning moments as a Twitter user. Or actually they really have nothing to do with my being a Twitter user so much as other people.

One is 'Sleeveface guy'. He's someone who has carved out a particular space for himself in the world by photographing himself or other people, and collecting photographs by others, in which the subject obscures his face with an album cover also featuring a face - the point being that it makes the person look as if he is the famous person on the cover. A Toronto radio station recently brazenly ripped him off in a media ad campaign.

Now 'Sleeveface guy' is no celebrity. But he does have a published book, one I'd flipped through in an Indigo. He was someone I could say I'd 'heard of', and it was quite early in my online adventures that he tweeted about my 'Better as a Single' blog. Seeing someone I'd 'heard of' tweeting about me was a serious trip, even if it's pretty small potatoes as things go.

The second jewel in my crown was much more recent. I'm a bit of a geek for election stats and polling info, to the point that I have a blog called 'Poll Vaulting' dedicated to it and also include a lot of polling references on this blog, 'A Proper Blog', when I fear my own political convictions will make whatever I'm writing a bit less than objective. Canada has only a few big-name pollsters, and you get to know all of them by name if you follow the business.

A particular favourite of mine is Frank Graves, CEO of EKOS Polling. EKOS is often accused of having an anti-Conservative bias, which I admit might be why I like him - it might be true that we're attracted to data that tells us what we want to hear. Anyway I additionally like his commentary, which I tend to find very intellingent and informative. Just a week or two ago I wrote a blog based on his own crow-eating post-mortem on his election results, and was honoured to find Graves himself tweeting my blog entry.

The third is probably the most awesome, though I'll never know how 'real' it is. Yoko Ono had tweeted that you could ask her questions by tweeting them to her and she'd answer some of them. So I did, asking her a question about Joe Jones, whom she'd performed with on the 'Fly' album.

Now I genuinely like Yoko Ono as a performer and a musician, and it might well be that not many people tweeted musicianly questions to her. As it was, i kind of imagine that a media consultant of one kind or another working with Ono would find her, in person or over a phone, and ask her preselected questions, which Ono would answer verbally. Someone would transcribe them, and voilà! Q&A interactivity. Still, I do imagine the actual words were Yoko's, so having Yoko Ono answer a question I'd asked was a rare fanboy honour that had me giddy in a way no man in his mid-thirties has a right to be.

The answer was posted on her website, not on Twitter. But it still counts, because it came from Twitter.

I bet I could stalk celebrities on Twitter and amass a portfolio of celebrity answers to my questions or celebrity references to me. But meh. Why bother?

Note: I've spent ages trawling through the archives at imaginepeace.com, looking for Yoko's answer to my question, and I can't find it. It might be there, but I'm bored of looking. Sorry...