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:

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.

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?

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.

First Joe Hockey was missing, then he was sighted, then he was lost again. With thanks to Twitter’s @andrewbolt, Joe Hockey has been found again.

@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.

…think this is one of the coolest websites I’ve seen in ages.

How are the PM and Opposition leader spending their respective Wednesdays?

Kevin Rudd:

Malcolm Turnbull:

Remember how Jim Schembri dumped shit on bloggers from a great height only to become a blogger himself? Now the Sydney Morning Herald’s Richard Glover has dumped shit on Twitterers from a great height.

Twitter, in particular, is like the last frantic dance before the sinking of the Titanic. Thousands are joining Twitter every second. They are like e-lemmings off an e-cliff. People are desperate to be part of it.

Once they’ve signed on, they get to send constant text messages to their friends, detailing their current activity. Stuff like: “I just had breakfast.” And: “I am running late for the bus.” And: “I just missed the bus on account of stopping to send that last message on Twitter.”

[...]

Twitter, I imagine, will be a success for about three months. Then, just as quickly as it began, everyone will get over it. They’ll become ex-Twitters. “Yes”, they’ll say, “once upon a time I Twatted.” Or, more simply: “I was a Twat.”

Nasty! So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this Twitter account.

Straight from the Twatter’s mouth

Oh, Kevin!

An apostrophe shitstorm

Maybe Rudd should give his employee’s a punctuation lesson.

Fake Andrew Bolt, via Twitter, hints at unrest within the HWT building.

Melissa Doyle is a wise speaker of The Truth:

I will never tolerate another negative comment about her again. The woman is an angel.

ABC News has published a hard-hitting story about fake Twitter accounts, including GrodsCorp’s favourite, Andrew Bolt.

However, ABC incorrectly identifies Family First Senator Steve Fielding’s account as fake. I’ve been carefully watching Steve on Twitter since he bumbled into the murky Web2.0 world early this morning and he’s definitely for real.

Initially he encountered technical difficulties.

Joined Twitter. Can’t work out how to add picture. Checked Bible but no help.

So he went looking for help.

Called Danny Nalliah to see if he knows how to add picture to Twitter. No help.

Checking Torah for clues on picture uploading.

But then things started to go wrong.

Damn! Torah in some squiggly language that I don’t understand. I hope it’s not Muslim.

Ran in tears to Susan. She assured me that I won’t catch Arab from accidentally reading Muslim.

After that traumatic episode Steve turned his attention towards ensuring he has support at the 2010 poll.

Have started phoning each person that voted ‘1′ for me in 2004. Should be finished on Friday.

Phew – hard work. All supporters are busy either homeschooling their kids or playing bingo in their nursing homes.

But there was a little speed bump.

Called supporter. Accidentally said, “Hi, it’s Steve Fielding from Fitness First here.” Embarrassment much?

Two other Tweeters replied to Steve’s amusing anecdote. @parissite said “Don’t worry – I’m pretty sure that you have said “Family Fist” to your other supporter on more than one occasion”, and @Pollytics said “2yrs ago had a door knocker with thick accent say “I’m So & So from Family Fist.” I couldnt stop laughing, poor bloke.” Confused, Steve asked for more information.

@Pollytics @parissite I don’t get it. What’s so funny about the word “fist”?

And then the wheels fell off.

Looked up “fist” on Urban Dictionary. Teary again. Susan wrapped me in blanky for cuddles and hot Milo.

After such a horribly emotional and traumatic day it’s rather insensitive of ABC News to accuse Steve Fielding of being a fraud. For shame.