I was whiling away the hours on Twitter this afternoon when a strange message popped up:

Wait…what? Thankfully @AndrewBolt stepped in to inform the masses of this troubling news, which was no doubt the fault of Al Gore.

With serious Twitter muscle behind him, the story exploded. All people could talk about was #tunnelcow. An unremarkable story about a cow in a metropolitan tunnel became one of the highest trending topics on Twitter.

But where was the MSM? On the most important story of the day they’d gone AWOL. @AndrewBolt demanded answers:

#tunnelcow was trending through the roof, but the MSM was strangely silent. Even @774melbourne stopped mentioning #tunnelcow.

Other worrying signs of Leftist supression began to pop up, beginning with a tweet from true comprade @thewetmale:

What could the reason for the stony wall of Leftist silence? Sure enough, @AndrewBolt received an alarming tip-off.

Meanwhile, the first pictures of #tunnelcow were appearing:

Indisputable evidence of a bovine shennanigans in the tunnel if there ever were any.

And for no reason here’s a tweet from @andyblume:

Finally, @AndrewBolt used all his charisma on the cause of freedom of information.

As I type, #tunnelcow chatter continues on Twitter, and the ABC finally tried to file #tunnelcow away as a frivilous story on a frivilous blog. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

#tunnelcow’s whereabouts remain unknown. Final words to @carousella:

Seriously, mofos, if you read only one blog post this year make it this one by Trevor. I literally have tears rolling down my cheeks.

Marvel as one YouTube commenter comprehensively pwns another while maturely discussing the merits of a Nirvana song:

I love you, internet.

This ran in the Crikey email last Thursday.

_________________

It must be pretty humbling to feel your power slipping away. And not just slipping away to an equally powerful competitor, but slipping away to — gasp! — ordinary people.

Let’s just say you’re the Australian head of a massive, global media company and that you’re accustomed to people doing what you say. You grew up in a social and business environment where money meant power, where media barons were the only people who could afford to communicate directly with large numbers of people; it has been this way for as long as you can remember, and as long as your father’s generation can remember for that matter. But one day along comes this thing called The Internet, promising to democratise the flow of information, and something terrible begins to happen: the plebs grow bold and start to rise up, empowered by having their voice heard, unworried about profit or business models. If you were that media baron what would you do? Would you adapt or would you atrophy?

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It’s been a long, hard slog on Gmail chat, over the course of many weeks …

me: Now fucking sign up for fucking Twitter. Fucken.

Bron: fuck twitter!

me: You know you want it

Bron: Pleh.

… but I finally won.

Go check out Bron’s Twitter feed.

What is it with The Right and “what is it with The Left and…”?

Discuss.

Update: Darryl Mason gives us a small smattering of examples from Bolt’s blog:

What is it with the Left and violence?

What is it with the Left and vomitously vindictive snobbery?

What is it with the left and not being normal????

What is it with the left and censorship?

What is it with the Left and their purely derivative style?

What is it with the Left and Jew-hating, full stop?

What is it with the left and sticking their noses in other peoples lives?

What is it with the left and a complete failure to be witty?

What is it with the left and zero comprehension skills?

What is it with the left and denying undeniable fact?

What is it with the left and excuses?

What is it with the Left and crazies?

What indeed?

Ladies and gentlemen, sometimes you have to go out and find the internet and sometimes the internet finds you. It is my great pleasure to introduce Trevor, a brand new GrodsReader who dropped into GrodsCorp earlier to share this insight into football.

If you ask me (and my brother has) it’s the Richmond board he need to be sacked and not Terry. I remember when David Parkin walked out at 3/4 time when Carlton (the Blues) were beating us (the bombers) and I yelled GET THE GUN at Parkins direction.

I didn’t really mean to get a gun to shoot him dead like the Herald said about Terry and I didn’t mean it the way Mark “Brandon” Chopper Read did when he was going to shoot Warrick Capper in the thigh for a bet one day at Victoria Park (which was detailed in Choppers biography). My brother Wayne is a mad Magpies fan and that’s why I was at the game.

This would have been the number one viewed article because the Wallace sacking (and not sacking) was a big story last week in the news.

Trevor hails from the imaginatively titled My Blog where you’ll find stream-of-consciousness rants about football, recipes for “Trevor’s chicken soup minus the chicken”, and stunning gems of cutting edge commentary such as this:

I would like to weigh into the debate about West Coast and Hawthorn (former) coach Ken Judge’s use of a joke about Hitlers gas bill. He said some bloke was bigger than it. What people who are offended by the joke need to realise is that Hitler didn’t use LPG or natural gas and the type of gas he used on the Jewish nation couldn’t be billed in the same sense that we get a gas bill. Hitler used pellets which gave off a rather nasty smell and most probably bought the pellets at wholesale prices and he wouldn’t have paid for the pellets out of his own pocket.

This is where peoples offence get confused.

You simply must check it out.

So, I’ve taken up Twitter. I started following Leigh Sales, because I like her on Lateline and she seems smart and funny. I started following people I know from blogging, like Scott and some Crikey guys. And of course, I started following the fake politicians. But imagine my surprise when this happened:

What have I done to deserve this?

A mate of mine currently on a round-the-world junket work trip has sent back a couple of short messages in the place of postcards. The first was a 7.06am text message on a Monday morning:

Dude, I know it’s early for you but I’m getting pissed with Tim Berners-Lee in Madrid.

Show off.

The second was an email this afternoon from Shanghai:

Scotty,

You will be pleased to know the Great Firewall of China blocks youtube.com but not grods.com.

This has been a public service announcement.

We’re big in China.

UPDATE (6.00pm): An email from my friend, currently drinking one dollar Tsingtao beers collected from from vending machines.

Ok. Now Grods is blocked thanks to me and (I am assuming) your post – that didn’t take long!

We’re not so big in China no more.

Sally Morrell, the Herald Sun’s most stunningly vacuous columnist, hates Twitter.

I LOVE the net, like the blogs, and tolerate even Facebook for the teenagers. But Twitter is for the birds – and the birdbrained.

[...]

But it’s now clear that “twit” was a noun just looking for a verb.

The beautiful irony? 18 out of the 25 paragraphs — a whopping 72% — in Sally’s “article” (the word “article” implies journalism so I put it in inverted commas) are under the 140 character limit for tweets, making Sally Australia’s best Twitter journalist. 140 character bursts of vapidity with no greater meaning or purpose, connected by not a single coherent idea. Perhaps it’s time to compile some more Sally stanzas.

I was at the pub with Craig, Chuck and some others recently when one of the others — a non-Twitter user — asked, “So what exactly is Twitter?” Craig — a devoted Twitter user — went to answer immediately, stopped, struggled to organise his thoughts, stumbled over some clumsy words, before managing the following explanation: “Twitter is like sending emails out into the internet.”

Many people are genuinely intrigued and confused by Twitter, and continue to be intrigued and confused when they fail to extract a suitable explanation for its appeal from devoted users. What is it about such a seemingly simple tool that has so many people hooked? Is a 140 character brain fart into the ether the pinnacle of 30 years of internet development?

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The great man is following me.

Might have something to do with my re-tweet this morning, complete with creative hash tag.

Imagine being Malcolm Turnbull logging into the prestigious and respected NineMSN news website over your Sunday morning Nescafe, only to find this poll on the front page:

Then imagine being Malcolm Turnbull clicking on the associated link, only to find this story from the archives:

Imagine being Malcolm Turnbull and feeling as invisible as you would.

(Thanks to reader Phyllis Stein.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the revolution is over. Random Brainwave, formerly owned and operated by John Surname, is now in the control of Chuck A. Spear after a hostile takeover. 11 of the 15 posts currently on the front page were written by Chuck and are brilliant examples of cutting satire, while the remaining four by Surname are all complete shit.

I mean, Chuck wrote a piss-funny cat blogging post and Surname responded with a piss-poor cat blogging post; Chuck wrote a post that had a piss-funny photo of a man photocopying his head and Surname responded with a post that had a piss-poor embedded YouTube video. Give it up, John. You’ve been outclassed.

So now that you’ve achieved total victory at RB, Chuck, come and write for GrodsCorp. You’re better than that place.

@Penny_Wong has long been my favourite TwitterPolitician (besides from @FakeFielding, of course) but tonight she absolutely captured my heart with this tweet.

“RuddSlapped”: GOLD.