Do you use Twitter?

This is another thing I use it for. I was just flipping through it on Saturday to check updates on the Portland Timbers/Toronto FC game, and saw a ton of tweets with the same basic message, wishing Will Johnson from the Timbers well. My first thought, WTF happened to Will? Scroll down a bit--turns out he busted his tibia and fibula, ending his season. Ouch.

I'm looking forward to using more of my favorite hashtag this winter: #BlazersinSuits.

 

Ugh, one of my local breweries just got on Twitter and they still have no idea how to use it effectively. Essentially, they're just tweeting shit from their Facebook, which in turn is actually something from their Instagram...which means they're not using hashtags to their utmost. Whoever is doing their social media clearly SUCKS at it. It's fine to go Instagram to Twitter--it preserves the hashtags--but doing it via Facebook doesn't work. I'd love to do my part to promote them and share their stuff, but I'm not going to pass on content like that. I'll probably follow them on Instagram and then repackage what they're doing so they can see how it should be done.

 

I gave it up a couple of years ago. Seemed like it was turning into not much more than sports, celebs, and yetanother venue for advertising. I'm really interested in all but three of those things. I haven't even missed it.

 

Well, you curate your own content, so that's your choice.

My Twitter feed is all beer, wine, food, and sports, centered around my region of the country. A lot of people covering these topics are just regular people. I think the only real celebrities I have are Mario Batali, Alton Brown, and various sports figures.

 

Sweet FSM...I just got a follow from the local Christian station.

For the record, my tweets are largely about beer, wine, food, and sports, so I'm curious as to why a Christian station would follow me in the first place.

 

Well, there's the local angle for one thing, and, despite all the attention given to the Christian 'far right' a lot of Christians are just 'regular people' that like beer, wine, food, and sports. And sex.

 

Given the heavy Mennonite population in the part of the county the station is located and caters to, probably not.

 

I had an interesting exchange on Twitter yesterday, and were this behind the scenes more, I'd post the article that started the whole thing.

Anyway, two teens wrote an article for the big city daily paper as part of a journalism camp purportedly examining how my city has become a "food city" in the last fifteen years. While I had no complaints about the article's mechanics, it talked a lot about the history of downtown, but didn't really examine any of the major restaurants that had contributed in the seachange to the food scene, and it went on quite a tangent about how opening the Starbucks in the late '90s changed the food scene downtown (it didn't). So I shared the article on Twitter, tagging the paper, mentioned it barely brushed the surface of what is actually going on regarding the restaurant scene here. Out of the umpteen (164, according to TripAdvisor, more according to other sources) restaurants they could have tried, they tried a noodle place and a Chinese restaurant that are both largely only patronized by the international student population, and certainly not remotely representative of our food scene in the slightest.

The journalist overseeing the two teens replied that they wrote the article in two days at camp, and she was really proud of their achievement (really? I teach teens writing for a living, didn't seem like much of an achievement, especially if they had sixteen hours to devote before deadline). I replied that I understood the time crunch, the word count crunch, but that the piece could have shown better research skills. She then replied that they were limited because the two teens were underage.

That's when the shit hit the fan. WHAT? How is that even a reasonable excuse? There is literally ONE restaurant in town that does not serve minors because it's a tavern. ONE. Believe me, I know where to go to avoid under-21ers. Everywhere else has a restaurant and bar, or is a brewpub, which means they can serve minors until 9. So I replied explaining that, tagging some of the major eateries in town--brewpubs, fancier places, etc.

All of them replied, saying they served food to minors.

The reporter then tried to claim that they hadn't been able to get ahold of the owners of some of these places, which then led several of the restaurants to say, JUST STOP BY AND ASK. We're not the Big City. You can roll in the door and ask to talk to the chef or the manager. She mentioned one place in particular, where I know both the kitchen manager (we're former coworkers) and the day bar manager (he's a chill dude, very active in the local beer scene, owns half of a craft brewery), and I was just scratching my head wondering, WTF. I interned at the publication in question, and when I was a teen at the paper, I was taught that journalism meant going up to people and asking questions, whether you'd called ahead or not, in the interest of getting a story. Plus, advance notice isn't really necessary in good food journalism, unless you're trying to write some fluffy, promo piece. Most of the major facts about these establishments could have easily been gleaned from the Web--hell, the local credit union has a piece on their site about this business in particular.

I was just so happy to see the restaurants get to say their fair share. We do have a remarkable food scene here, but a Chinese restaurant and a noodle place only reflect less than 5% of what's going on.

 

Wow, I almost died today! My favorite weatherman, who is a semi celebrity in Portland, followed me a while ago. Today he retweeted a picture of my dinner. I tweeted after that I felt like I'd made it since I've been watching him on TV for years, as he was a young weatherman when I was a teen. He said thank you!

I squeed and had a weather fangirl moment.

 

Did your nether regions become warm and humid?