Goodbye Elon goodbye

I decided to quit Twitter.

I don’t expect the Earth to stop because of that nor do I even expect the few likes my posts used to (sometimes) get to miss me. But, finally, Twitter got me.

Honestly, it’s not like I even looked at it every day. I didn’t.

It took a buildup, I confess.

First, it was the phony information that made Twitter all atwitter.

Then, it was tracking ex-President Trump’s tweets. Why, I’m not sure, because they always made the news in nanoseconds anyway so I couldn’t fall behind by much.

Twitter finally started suspending accounts for distributing false or threatening information. Unfortunately, they didn’t suspend accounts for just being stupid (I guess because then Twitter would get far fewer postings plus, SENATOR Herschel Walker may be on his way).

Of course, there were those many irrelevant ads. I’d click to not see them anymore and other uninteresting ads took their place.

And, now, there’s Elon!! No thank you. I have to draw the line somewhere.

I did follow some interesting people – like Liz Cheney; White House Press Secretary Karin Jean-Piere; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a New York Times correspondent; Prof. Peter Hotez dean of the Baylor School of Medicine and star TV explainer about pandemics and vaccines.; Broadway's Seth Rudetsky; Tess Gerritsen, a favorite mystery writer; Chasten  Buttigeg, husband of the Transportation secretary;  a whole bunch of political reporters and, one of my very favorites, Room Rater, which rates room set ups of people being interviewed on TV via Zoom or Skype.


There were, of course, the occasional brilliant tweets. Like when Colm Flynn, Vatican correspondent for EWT news, tweeted:

“For the past 20 years I’ve received a Valentine’s card from the same secret admirer. So I was pretty upset when I didn’t get one this year. First my granny dies, now this.”

Well, I enjoyed it.

One of my favorites that I posted was:

“Just for the record, you don’t have to ‘take a listen;’ You can simply listen.”

That was in response to the annoying phrase TV news people have adopted to get you to pay attention to a video clip. “Take a listen,” they say, and I wonder where I should take it.

Then again, I don’t think any of my paltry number of followers "liked' it, so maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought. Or, maybe nobody’s truly following me. (Though what about all those beautiful young women whose profile pics that show them in scanty outfits who didn’t know me but followed me?)

The main thing I used Twitter for was as one more “platform” to distribute this blog.

I’m going to suspend Twitter today. As I understand it, it stays suspended for 30 days and then, unless I sign in again, it deletes itself (I always think of Mission Impossible when I see that).

So, for all my blog followers on Twitter, this is the last post you’ll see here. If you want to continue reading it, though, I direct you to other places I post it -- LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium. On Medium you actually can subscribe to it and Medium will send you an email including the post right after I publish it.  

Of course, there always is the modestly named “bjaycooper.com” where the blog resides.

So..goodbye Twitter goodbye. Good bye Elon, don’t cry!