Canada - Fewer Twits Per Square Mile

Hey, Yanks, don't go calling Canadians a bunch of twits. You know not of what you speak.

There are times I think I spend too much time on the computer. I spend considerable time on this blog, at HumorBloggers.com and reading the blogs of friends and cyber-colleagues as well as managing my Facebook page, listening to blip.fm, watching You Tube videos, sending and receiving e-mails, and sending and receiving "tweets" or Twittering.

Now I find Twitter kind of cool. You can follow colleagues, sports figues like NBA star Shaq, movie stars like Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Kevin Spacey, recording artists such as John Mayer and Weird Al and late night talk-show hosts like Jimmy Fallon. You can even follow the musings, er, ah, tweets of...

Seems, however, that in the Twitter universe, at least, I'm a minority.

The Globe and Mail newspaper reported last week on the findings of a recent survey by the polling firm Ipsos Reid. They found that 1 in 100 Canadians use Twitter.

Moreover, said the Globe, the study polled 824 Canadian adults online and found that while 26 per cent of respondents are aware of Twitter, only 6 per cent of them had "actually spent some time coming up with witty 140-character messages". (Yeah, and if you ask me, considerably less than 2 per cent actually succeed in demonstrating how witty they are!) Astoundingly, this figure translates into about 1 per cent of the Canadian population. Amazing.

Now 824 people isn't much of a sample size. Nevertheless the survey would seem to portray the majority of Canadians as a bunch of techno-pesants. Six per cent of those polled had actually used Twitter? What provincial backwater, hole-in-the-wall are these people from? Have they been living under a rock? Don't they watch TV, read newspapers, browse the interwebs?

Say what? They have lives? Oh, never mind.

30 Days of Photos III #4 Sour

Check out Ziva's Inferno for the rest of today's photos.

My Back Pages - November

I know, I know, I know I should have reported in before now. But sometimes real life just gets in the way. I attempted 5 books in November. I say attempted because I slapped a big DNF (did not finish) on Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I just can't seem to get into this guy. It's the second or third of his I've given up on, Not so the other four, starting with a biography of Stephen Stills called Change Partners. This followed by a hilarious biography of the guy responsible for National Lampoon called A Stupid and Futile Gesture - How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever. I ended the month reading yet another biography, this one of the man behind Rolling Stone magazine,. It was called Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. A fascinating read. So last month I hit the magic number 50 I'd imagined for myself back in January. If I roll this month into my yearly total I'm at 54 books. And I still hav...

The Polka Dot Door

A long time ago, when I was 22, my first child was born. That kid grew up on a little Canadian kid's show called Polka Dot Door, produced by the TV Ontario network. And Dad, more often than not, sat through those shows with his little one. Nine or so years later when a brother, and a year after that when a sister came along number one son was moving on to Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard. But there was a nice overlap where his siblings picked up where he had left off with Polka Dot Door. And Dad was right there to welcome them. So you're looking at a Polka Dot Door veteran. The show began in 1971 and ran to 1993. I didn't watch the full run but I did get in my fair share. The formula was pretty simple. A young male and female host, which seemed to change every week, sang songs, told stories, made crafts and generally did their best stimulate little brains. The show opened as follows... Imagination Day! Oh boy! ...

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