Who's Here?

(Prelude: So I wrote this all passionately on Thursday night, thinking it would make a good Saturday morning read if you were inclined to have a cup of coffee and pop open your laptop. But since then there have been multiple articles and even some video segments on Hockey Night in Canada devoted to this exact topic below. That, I suppose, is the Twitter game - you snooze you lose. So if you've already read this exact post more or less on Jibblescripts, then I do apologize. Just send me an e-mail and your letting me know you're favorite tv show and your mom's name and I'll write you back a personalized post about Riley Cote doin' it with both of them. If you have not read anything on it, enjoy.)

If you're not familiar with Twitter, and I'm not really, as Fran is our Director of Micro-Blogging, there's something I learned about on Thursday that is actually kind of fun. I had been put off by the idea of Twitter for a long time, and to tell you the truth I still kind of am. I'm by no means barking out "those god damned kids and their computers" but I like to keep my interneting simple. It's actually kind of funny that I write on a blog because I don't spend that much time on the web. I don't use Facebook. I don't have an iPhone (yet, maybe). This is just the way I'm built and I think it's great. I also think the way you're built is great. You know what I'm talking about you sauce pot.

Excuse me and anyway.

I have enough trouble following what I'll call my "real life," that life on the web, to me, is an added distraction I don't care for unless I want to be distracted. I don't want to be hooked to it like a certain supermarket because I have their little card on my key chain. You may think I'm all over the internet all day because this blog is up here all day, but reality I'm like Muhammad Ali sticking and jabbing posts and moving to space.

My wariness of being over-informed combined with my anti-trend nature had me promising myself I'd never tweet. And then I launched about 15 of them in 10 minutes Thursday, kind of ironically, as a result of something branded as a Trend.

Picture this - you're in a bar with 50 tables, six people sitting around each of them. Every 20 minutes they give you a topic and you write a creative/funny sentence about it. Each table turns theirs in and then they read them off a big screen in front of you. Some crack you up and some are like eh….and the winner gets a free round. Could be fun right? Not every 20 minutes, but every so often this exact thing happens on Twitter. It comes along like the one 3 foot wave you've been waiting for all day at the Jersey Shore. Some people get on early, some people ride it perfectly, some miss it and try to fake almost catching it by swimming really fast.

So Thursday night on gChat (yes I was on) Fran started peppering me with related but unrelated questions in quick succession:

"Who is the Flyers biggest bust ever?"

"Who's that goalie who got his throat slit open?"

"Who's the ugliest guy in the NHL? Chara or OV?"

If you don't like trivia you're not human. My interest was naturally piqued by the nature and flow of his questions. I had either an answer or an opinion on all of them. So I asked him what he was doing. And he told me to go to Twitter (which I have sometimes used as a search engine) and search #unpublishedNHLbooks. So I did. And hilarity ensued. People all over the world were submitting fake books with hilarious titles and authors to this Trend. Just cause. And I couldn't help myself. And there's a reward too. When someone thinks your tweet was funny they might retweet it just to let everyone know. And that's strangely encouraging. Here are some of ours, you may have seen them on our sidebar to the right hand side of the blog on Thursday and wondered what we were doing:

"Everybody Poops (The Bed)", by Alexandre Daigle
"The Man's Guide to Shaving" by Richard Zednik, Prologue by Clint Malarchuk
Keep Your Head Down and Skate Part II: The Eric Lindros Story
How to Record the an Entire Video Game in a Day by Gary Thorne and Bill Clement
The 5 People You Meet in Heaven are All Mike Richards by Pierre McGuire
"Ugly is Beautiful" by Alexander Ovechkin
"The Giver" by Adam Oates
Ass of Steel by Steve MacIntyre & Riley Cote
"Investment Strategies and Procedures" by Mike Rathje
Frommer's NHL Locker Rooms Guide by Mike Sillinger
"How to Fake Rumors and Alienate People" by Dwayne Eklund
"Life's a Gamble: Double Down!" by Rick Tocchet & Janet Gretzky

And what we were submitting was nothing compared to some other great ones from the probably thousands that were submitted:

"The Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Drunk" by Theo Fleury
The men who stare at Yotes by Jim balsille and bettman
"Dietary Suggestions For NHL Referees" by Jim Schoenfeld
"If I Did It" by Todd Bertuzzi
"Prejudice and Prejudice" by John Vanbiesbrouck

I mean, there are so many I can't even go back through them now because the list is too long.

Now, I'm not sure how something like this begins, but I'm guessing someone in the sphere just posts a first one (I think this one was Puck Daddy). And sometimes it swells into a tsunami and sometimes it goes unnoticed like a fart on your longboard. But when they come they are fun. And I'm not sure how many I'll ride, but Thursday's was a lot of fun, so I'll be on the lookout for more. Maybe you should be too.