Hello again everyone,
I will begin this post —as I do every year— with an apology for not doing more with this blog over the last twelve months. A new wrinkle on the familiar classic? Both of the posts I did here in 2022 were explaining why I wasn’t writing more. I am oddly proud of that.
Anyway, I am delighted to say 2022 has now seen me married and well-launched into a new novel (of which I will say nothing more here), so on the whole things have been very productive in a way not really meant for public consumption. For people who want regular content from me, please check out my Twitter account.
With that said, it should be acknowledged some big things are happening on and to Twitter as I write this post. Who knows if there will even be a Twitter at the end of 2023, or if I’m going to be an active member by then? Time will tell the tale, but this very well might be the final entry in a series of posts going back to 2010. I like to think if I do move on from Twitter, I’ll continue this tradition with Note or Mastodon or one of the other Twitter alternatives being bandied about at the moment. We’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it, I guess.
Okay, let’s move on to the only content I have reliably contributed to this blog for more than a decade now, my ‘top tweets of the year’ post. For those interested in the previous collections, here are the Top 10 of 2010, Top 11 of 2011, Top 12 of 2012, Top 13 of 2013 & Top 14 of 2014, Top 15 of 2015 & Top 16 of 2016, Top 17 of 2017, Top 18 of 2018, Top 19 of 2019, Top 20 0f 2020 (With some COVID-19 Honourable Mentions), and Top 21 of 2021.
Two years ago I cheated a little and made a COVID-19-related highlight reel at the end so those tweets didn’t crowd out other content. This year I’m not going to do that, but I am going to include a few honourable mentions that were eliminated from ‘Top 22’ consideration for being two linked tweets rather than ones that stood on their own, which was the standard I chose to follow back in 2010 when tweets were 14o characters, and I’m not even sure if you were able to reply to your own tweets at the time to make a thread. Things have changed over the years, clearly. Meanwhile, there is every possibility this time next year character counts will be eliminated entirely by Twitter, or Twitter will be eliminated entirely, or I will have moved onto a character-limitless social media platform, so why not throw a couple of ‘too long’ tweets on the end that I enjoy and would like to look back on fondly in years to come?
Alright, then. With this year’s preamble now done, here are my favourite tweets from the past year:
My Favourite 22 Tweets of 2022
February 2, 2022
In the childhood baseball taunt, “We want a pitcher, not a belly-itcher! We want a catcher, not a belly-scratcher!” What exactly is going on? Is there a rash going around? Is the crowd saying the catcher should help his itchy teammate, or not, or are these two unrelated problems?
(Admittedly an odd entry to start my annual list. When I tweeted it, I didn’t know this would be the first one that I continue to enjoy almost a year later. January had a few tweets short-listed, but they were slice-of-life things that I have done elsewhere better. This is a one-off random thought that tickles me, and isn’t that the whole point of a microblogging site like Twitter? Where else can you write something like this and consider it a worthy contribution to a larger body of work?)
February 16, 2022
So the lap pool is open in my building. My fiancée and I booked a 30-minute time slot. I started out at my old pre-COVID pace. Mistake! A humbling, humbling mistake…
Everything hurts now, and I am so very tired…
March 23, 2022
This morning I put a typo in the word typo while apologizing for a typo on a workplace group chat.
I’m the company’s copywriter and copy editor, and this was not my finest moment.
This has been today’s Twitter confession.
(For the first month or so of 2022, Ontario entered another severe lockdown such that I worked from home all week. I believe by March we were into a ‘three days at home, two days in the office’ hybrid model. This tweet must have been from a team meeting on a day where we were all working from home.)
May 5, 2022
My fiancée is constantly amused I call them blue jeans.
“What else would I call them?” I ask.
“Jeans!” She says.
“But they ARE blue jeans. They’re blue!” I insist.
We’re not even agreeing to disagree. We fundamentally do not understand the other’s position.
(This tweet included a GIF, which is a rarity for me. I decided to illustrate this dialogue exchange with a clip of Neil Diamond singing, “Forever in Blue Jeans, Babe!”)
May 17, 2022
My fiancée and I have now attended two @BlueJays games this season, and both times the Jays won. I’m not saying our presence is the deciding factor, but if the team and/or the fanbase want to give us some tickets, we’re prepared to continue our experiment and gather further data.
(I believe we ended up attending five games together, and I attended another one as part of my bachelor party. For the season I think we ended up winning just a little more than we lost when we attended a game. We look forward to collecting more data next season.)
May 24, 2022
I love overhearing banter in my office:
“You said, ‘Go nuts!’ ”
“I never said, ‘Go nuts!’ ”
“Well you said, ‘Do whatever you usually do,’ and I usually go nuts…”
(A lot of office banter made the long list for this year’s top tweets. This is the only one that made the Top 22, but it is an excellent representation of the others. I work with a lot of people I really enjoy.)
June 30, 2022
“On the horns of a dilemma.” What visual does that expression give you? I imagine myself draped across the antlers of an Irish elk, high enough up off the ground that I can’t figure out how to get down safely. I guess for that to make sense, the elk needs to be named Dilemma?
July 30, 2022
Family: “There’s not enough stuff on your wedding registry!”
Also family: “Take that off your registry. I have one I never use I’ll give you for free.”
Also family: “Has such and such already been purchased? We don’t know how a registry works.”
We just want money…
(I was a little amazed how few wedding tweets made the Top 22. I thought I might need to set up an honourable mentions section the way I did with COVID-19 in 2020 to keep these tweets from drowning out everything else, but I think it worked out to a reasonable fraction of my year’s best content considering how much of my year revolved around my wedding. This is the first, and talking about this still gets my wife and I fired up. We didn’t get hitched in our early 20s. Both of us had been living alone for more than a decade before we got engaged. We needed new kitchen appliances and household accoutrements like we needed another hole in the head, but people kept asking us to update our registry with stuff we didn’t want. Ah, well. It all worked out.)
August 5, 2022
The 2nd Century CE author Lucian wrote a comedic sketch in which the letter Sigma sues the letter Tau in court for encroaching on his syllabic territory as a commentary on the conflict between Common & High Attic Greek.
Nerdy then; among the nerdiest things I’ve ever read now.
(I pride myself on reading some pretty deep cuts of history. This discovery was worthy of repeating to a larger audience.)
August 11, 2022
At 1:15 pm today I am picking up my marriage license at Toronto City Hall.
At 12:40 downtown Toronto lost power, and it’s been out long enough some buildings are beginning to evacuate.
I am doing my very best to think this is funny, not the universe trying to tell me something.
August 18, 2022
Cheese shopping with the future Mrs.
“Hey!” I say, getting her attention and gesturing to a nearby product. “You know, I hear the Gouda is alright-a.”
I live to make her roll her eyes.
Also? She was expecting me to say ‘good-a,’ but I zigged when she thought I’d zag.
Sepember 7, 2022
Driving up to Sault Ste Marie for a wedding. We’re staying overnight at a northern Ontario Comfort Inn that spends its summer months desperately trying to air out all the cigarette smoke from people who can’t be arsed to go outside in a -40C winter to honour the No Smoking rule.
(I’m not going to lie. This made the Top 22 in large part because of how much I managed to squeeze into those 280 characters. Is it the funniest or most insightful thing I ever tweeted? No. Does it paint a picture with all the context necessary to put you in that unpleasant room? Yes. I should also add this was for the fourth of four weddings we went to the summer before out wedding on October 22nd. As a rule I do not tweet at weddings, but I do tweet before and after them in long threads that I cannot put in a ‘best of’ list. All of them were excellent and memorable, each in their own very different way. We did a lot of benchmarking in the run up to our own big day.)
September 20, 2022
My fiancée said my suggestion of inviting someone new to the wedding on short notice might be considered by some the heights of impropriety, to which I replied: “Oh, let’s not call it the heights. Perhaps the understandable lowlands of impropriety. Foothills tops.”
(As our RSVPs came back we found out which friends and relatives would and would not be able to attend, which freed us up to reach out to people we hadn’t already invited because of capacity limits. There was a bit of a scramble to make sure everyone we wanted to be there got an invitation, but it all worked out in the end. It was a very happy day full of our favourite people.)
October 13, 2022
The next time I buy a microwave, I want to hear the floor model before making my purchase. The designers of my current microwave decided this model need to scream like a ravenous baby eagle who demands to be fed and will not be ignored. Next time I will get a calmer appliance.
(Strictly speaking the microwave came with the apartment we’re renting, but that bit of trivia wasn’t worth squeezing into this tweet. I do stand by this decision, though. For the rest of my life whenever I am buying a noise-making appliance, I am going to want to hear the damned thing before it contributes to the soundscape of my domestic life for years on end. There are some truly unpleasant characters waiting out there for unsuspecting consumers to invite unwittingly into their homes.)
October 24, 2022
It’s funny. I’ve had no problem switching over to thinking of my wife as my wife, but someone just called me her husband, and I did not make the connection at all. I asked for clarification.
(We got married on October 22nd. By the 24th we were on our honeymoon in Ireland. Everyone was very, very nice to the newlyweds. When someone called me her husband, though, the remark went right past me, and I did in fact ask who he was talking about.)
October 29, 2022
Hello from Sean’s Bar in Athalone, the oldest pub in Ireland and almost certainly the world. (Research for the global title is ongoing.) People have been drinking in this building where I sit for 1100+ years. That is not a typo.
(Did we make a special detour of more than an hour out of our way to visit this bar? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely, yes. I have sat in too many pubs in my life not to raise a glass in the Ur Bar —the great-granddaddy of them all— given half the chance. This place has been serving booze to passersby since Methuselah was in short pants. My wife liked it too!)
November 6, 2022
Getting the apartment organized. My wife just tore out all the ‘Wedding To Do List’ pages out of one of my notepads. My God, what a satisfying sound. Those pieces of paper have ruled our waking hours for months on end.
“Did we actually finish it all?” I asked, only half-joking.
(This was upon returning home after our honeymoon.)
November 12, 2022
Reading an Aldous Huxley book from 1959 before his reputation was cemented as the “Brave New World” guy. His author bio says he wrote a book called, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”? Oof. Glad his publisher went with that one over his original suggestion, “Pretentious? Moi?”
(I did not finish the book. This is the third or fourth time I’ve tried Huxley. The only one I have finished was Brave New World, and even that I think is only ranked as highly as it is for being innovative at the time, not on any real strength of plot or prose. He’s just not my cup of tea.)
November 20, 2022
The expression, “Snug as a bug in a rug” is entirely built around the rhyme but is otherwise nonsensical, right? No one rolled up a carpet full of insects one day thinking, “Look at them. They are loving that! We should use this as a euphemism for coziness forevermore…”
December 7, 2022
Sometimes I read the word ‘fascinate’ and my mind remembers the word of the day while watching the 2011 Royal Wedding was ‘fascinator.’ Every woman wore one, and the commentators said this word I had never heard before over and over again until something broke in my brain…
December 14, 2022
I’m delighted to read that Bob Barker is still living and thriving at 99. The real update I want, though? Give us his health update 364 days from now. That’s when he’ll be closest to 100 without going over.
(For non-North American readers, Bob Barker was the host for many decades of a game show called The Price is Right where being closest without going over was a huge part of the program. I appreciate this tweet is almost nonsensical without that context.)
December 26, 2022
I am a writer. I have two coffee mugs full of pens at my desk. For Christmas, my wife got me a box of really nice .5mm Muji gel pens as a stocking stuffer. Now I’m going through my mugs, throwing away every pen that doesn’t bring me joy. My God, this is so satisfying.
(I wrote this yesterday, so who knows if this really is going to stand the test of time? I do think it’s a nice idea to remember and highlight a little scene of domestic bliss as my wife and I enjoyed our first Christmas together as a married couple.)
Honourable Mentions
(As discussed earlier, here are a few ‘linked’ tweets that I enjoyed enough to add to my long list and short list, but in the end decided to disqualify from inclusion in the Top 22 because of their length. If I allow multiple-tweet threads to compete with standalone tweets, pretty soon I’ll be comparing metaphorical apples to metaphorical apple pies, and the only person who will actually worry about it is me, but I’ll worry about it too much. Better to have an honourable mentions category and enjoy them separately. I have used the + sign to mark the division between the first and second tweets. No idea if I’ll do this again next year, or if that will even be necessary…)
January 2, 2022
My parents both had live alligators/caimans as school pets: Mom had a grade school teacher with one in a terrarium that he fed in front of the kids; Dad’s high school had a mascot that would eat frogs and stuff.
What the hell was going on in Ontario schools in the 50s and 60s?
+
Someone on Facebook replied, “Funding.”
I added, “This just screams, ‘No one has ruined this for the rest of us yet, so there are at present no rules about having carnivorous reptiles around children on school grounds. Enjoy those toothy smiles while they last, kids!’
May 11, 2022
Years ago I had a boss with an identical twin brother. They even had similar mustaches & glasses. My boss wore a suit & tie to work every day. Sometimes his twin would pick him up for lunch wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. I still smile remembering him walking through the office.
+
Another fun thing about that boss, as long as I’m reminiscing? Whenever anyone mentioned Boston in any context he would interrupt to say, “—The greatest Rock band of all time! Continue…”
May 26, 2022
Listening to a podcast this morning and came across this gem of a thought: The Shang Dynasty Oracle Bones are like having access to the nightly prayers —and only the nightly prayers— of America’s 20th Century presidents. How would you reconstruct history through that window?
+
The archaeologist being interviewed played out the idea further. “Wait, is there a war happening? Is it the same war as that earlier prayer? Is this one about his dog being sick? Wait, is Wichita a person or a place?” That’s analogous to our window into Bronze Age China.
August 11, 2022
A random memory: At a school assembly I watched someone put enough current through a pickle to make it glow like a dim lightbulb. He ended his presentation saying with enough current you could make a brick do it too. What did he think 5th graders were going to do with that info?
+
Even if it was about inspiring a future generation of electricians and electrical engineers, isn’t it more likely to have young people playing with wiring trying to make things glow that shouldn’t glow, leading to fires and electrocutions?
—
And there we go! Another year, another list. From me and mine to you and yours, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! I hope 2023 is even better than 2022. I look forward to finding out soon and telling you all about it in the fullness of time. Cheers!
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