AT LARGE FAKE NEWS MONDAY: Twitter Teens Discover Three Stooges Were Real

SAN FRANCISCO (CAP) - Twitter was abuzz this week with incredulous tweets from teenagers throughout the U.S. who expressed amazement at discovering that the Three Stooges were apparently real people.
 
Nobody told me the stooges were real ... ? How am I just finding this out?! posted @lizamagong after seeing the new film version of The Three Stooges directed by the Farrelly brothers.

And @BabyDee22 sounds similarly surprised, tweeting: Guys, the Stooges were real dudes in like the 20s or something! #mindblown.

After some back-and-forth, general consensus among the teens seemed to be that, while they had at first thought the Stooges were newly invented movie characters, it turns out they were actual people with a superhuman capacity to withstand punishment delivered via eye pokes, nose pulls and blows from sledgehammers.
 
I guess they made all these B&W documenteries about them? I asked my grampa & he said they wore shorts, tweeted LuvCarly67, apparently referring to the short subjects made by Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard during the 1930s and 1940s. And @sammyLoveB tweeted, They had to keep replacing Stooges because they kept killing each other w/ hammers n sh-t. #gangsta.

Oddly enough, the tweets drew the attention of popular Twitter contributor and film critic Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago), who insisted that contrary to what the teenagers believed, the Stooges were not in fact real but actually fictional characters played by actors. The Stooges were about as real as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, tweeted Ebert.
 
Also, here's my losing entry in the 331st New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, he added.

But apparently Ebert's tweets just confused many of the teens further. For instance, @BoonAss899 replied, WTF is a Bugs Bunny? AYSOS? lol. And very few other teens follow Ebert's tweets, opting instead to follow Twitterers like @ladygaga.
 
Monsters, just found out the 3 Stooges were real - WTF? @ladygaga tweeted yesterday afternoon.

Even Sarah Killen, the woman whose Twitter feed was made into a television show after Conan O'Brien chose at random to follow her, weighed in, saying that she didn't know if the Three Stooges were real or not, but that she still thought that peanut butter was yummy.
 
I still can't believe I followed this girl, tweeted @ConanOBrien later that day.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

AT LARGE Fake News Monday: Woman Conan Followed On Twitter Offered Sitcom

HOLLYWOOD (CAP) - Sarah Killen, the woman Conan O'Brien chose at random to follow on Twitter last week, will write and produce an NBC sitcom based on her Twitter feed starting this fall.

The show, tentatively titled Lovely Button after Killen's Twitter username (@LovelyButton), will feature Danica McKellar, best known as Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years, as a woman who tweets about peanut butter and planning her wedding.

"We think Sarah's 33 tweets will make a fascinating basis for a sitcom," said NBC CEO Jeff Zucker. "She's clearly got what 18- to 49-year-old men are looking for, whatever that is."

The sitcom was originally planned to revolve around the changes in the main character's life after Conan O'Brien follows her on Twitter, but NBC had to scrap that angle after being threatened by O'Brien's attorneys.

"Apparently there's still some resentment there," admitted Zucker, who removed O'Brien from The Tonight Show after seven months to replace him with former host Jay Leno. "We sent (NBC executive) Dick Ebersol to his house to try to talk to him, but Max Weinberg came out and hit him with a timpani."

Some analysts say NBC is scrambling to compete with rival CBS, which recently announced a sitcom starring William Shatner based on the Twitter feed S--t My Dad Says, tentatively titled Oh, The Things My Dad Says!

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: Things to do on Twitter when you're dead

If you’ve had even a fleeting experience with the Internet, you’ve probably thought to yourself, “Is there anything Twitter can’t do?” You’ve also probably wondered why there are so many videos of cats, but also the Twitter thing.

For the uninformed, Twitter is a service that allows people to post messages in 140-character “tweets.” It’s revolutionized the way people use the Web, in that it’s forced millions of users to come up with shorter ways to call everyone else on the Internet a moron.

But the latest Twitter development should really push the service to the next level. Just in time for Halloween, a UK psychic is mounting the first-ever Twitter séance, which she’s referring to as a “Tweance.” Most Twitter activities start with “Tw,” which is a practice referred to, in marketing circles, as idiotic. I’m sorry, “twidiotic.”

The psychic, Jaynce Wallace, is seeking suggestions at twitter.com/tweance for famous dead people to contact on Oct. 30, which of course makes some pretty large assumptions:

1) That dead people know how to use Twitter. I know enough living people who can’t figure it out that it’s safe to assume Mahatma Gandhi’s not sitting around in his little dhoti, typing out 140-character messages on his afterlife-issued BlackBerry. (“Violence still sux!” etc.)

2) Even if dead people DO know how to use Twitter, is that really how they’d want to communicate with us over the mysterious expanse that divides us from the netherworld — the same way that Paula Abdul told us she wasn’t coming back to “American Idol”? It seems unlikely, especially given how satisfied the deceased seem to be communicating through decks of cards and Whoopi Goldberg.

That said, given the suggestions that have come through so far, it appears that most Twitter users aren’t interested in asking, say, Albert Einstein about the discrepancies between atomic and subatomic physics. People would much rather talk to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain — “How are you NOW?” one user asks him, apparently suggesting that he just get over his own grisly suicide already.

People also would like to hear from recently deceased actor Patrick Swayze, presumably to find out if being a ghost is anything like being in “Ghost,” or is it, you know, different? If there were any justice, Swayze would decide that this was the time not to be nice and beat all the Twitterers with ectoplasmic beer bottles.

Granted, there are some people interested in talking to more high-profile historical figures. For instance, one suggests, “You should ask Hitler if he feels sorry for everything he did.” I’m not sure what he’d answer, but it seems to me that if after everything that happened he still thinks he was on the right track, there’s no getting through to that guy.

All I know is, I think this whole Tweance concept could wind up being the start of a disturbing trend. One day you’re using Twitter to communicate with spirits, the next day you’re using it to put spells on people and steal their immortal souls. It flies in the face of what Twitter was invented for: real-time minute-to-minute progress of the Balloon Boy. Instead I prefer to subscribe to the opinion of nikiandrea16, who declared in a succinct but effective tweet, “NOOOOO TWEANCE!!! IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA!!!”

Then she posted a video of her cat.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE."