Happy Anniversary, Clobin

Where many friends engage in public conversations with one another over Facebook and Twitter to make sure everyone knows who they are talking to and about what, my BFF Chloë and I are way too mature for all that.  We tend to communicate through our blogs with elaborate posts featuring comics, videos, rules for other friendships, friendship business cards and pie charts analyzing each other’s Twitter feeds.

I don't have a business card, but our friendship does.

Now for the one year (and 11 day) anniversary of Chloë’s marriage to her husband Robin, I am sharing an illustrated version of the critically acclaimed speech I gave at their wedding.  Most of the photos are by Andrew Bassett.  I’m not sure if this will work, but actions will be noted in bracketed italics [like so].

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Hello everyone.  In case you haven’t met me yet, my name is Samuel.  As Chloë’s BFF, it came as no surprise that she should ask me to share a few remarks with all of you.  Since the whole night everyone has been talking about the wedding, I thought that a few people might be bored of it and interested in talking about something else for a change.  As some of you know, I have presented at conferences and public meetings on the subjects of ecology and ethics, but I was thinking that for the occasion I would branch out and try something new.  Let’s start.

All images I found when I searched 'Saskatoon' on Google Images.

As we are in Saskatoon, I thought that we could explore this city as a subject.  How did it come to be?  Why does it persist in being?  Why do I only ever come here in January?  I’ll try to make this a more relaxed presentation, so please feel free to interrupt me at any time if you have scripted questions.

How is this possible?

Let’s first take a look at this unlikely increase of population over time….

[Geoffrey Cameron interrupts presentation with obviously scripted dialogue:] Excuse me, Sam – if it’s alright I would just like to stop you right there with a two-part question.

[Samuel Benoit:] Oh Geoff, it’s so great to see you here – I didn’t know that Chloë had invited you.  Please go ahead.

[GC:]  Well, the first part has to do with Jean Murray’s 1959 analysis of the contest to host the university of Saskatchewan and how this played into the future development of the city…

[SB:]  Actually, I’m planning on getting to that.

[GC:]  Oh.  Great.  The second part of my question is to ask if you plan on covering what is going on right now, namely Chloë and Robin’s wedding.

[SB:]  Robin who?

[GC:]  Wilson.

[SB:]  …I’m going to need more than that.

[GC:]  The dude Chloë just married.

[SB:]  Oh yes!  THAT dude Chloë just married!  I considered doing a presentation on that, but again, figured everyone was more curious about Saskatoon.  But if that’s what people are interested in, I do have some notes on the subject.

[GC:]  I’d be interested in that.

[SB:]  Sounds like fun.  As Chloë can tell you, my memory is pretty bad – normally I count on her for how to spell common words, to tell me about things I have done and rude things I have said to people a long time ago – so putting down old stories without Chloë’s help is very challenging without making things up.

People have often been perplexed about our friendship.  Chloë and I have always expected that even our respective children would someday be confused by it.  “Why is Auntie Chloë so much smarter and funnier than mommy?” my future children will ask me.  “Why do we always have the most fun when Uncle Sam is around?  Also, why is he always around?”  They will ask Chloë.  To both sets of children, we will simply say “SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR NAILS.”

I have always been very protective of Chloë, usually opting to give her friends and roommates a hard time to test their worthiness.  All of her university roommates had no choice but expect phone calls for Chloë between two and five AM for me to call and sing her Elton John and Coldplay songs after late night assignment writing sessions.  [Pause to acknowledge one of Chloë’s former roommates in the audience:]  Hello Fiona, good to see you here.  You look rested.

Fiona looking rested.

I could barely tolerate her friend Goeff, who managed to weasel his way into her life while they both attended Trent University in Peterbourough and my back was turned.  To this day we can barely get along and only very recently I forced him to contribute to a wedding speech I was giving with some obviously scripted and poorly written text.

Geoff and I temporarily putting our differences aside for the sake of the kids.

Even Chloë’s father Bruce has been subjected to my tests of worthiness despite the fact that – so he claims – he knew Chloë first.

Where's the proof?

Somehow these tests of worthiness also explain why I had to shamelessly flirt with Chloë’s old roommate Celeste every time I visited Chloë in Peterborough.  [Pause to shamelessly flirt with Celeste:]  Hello Celeste.  You are looking wonderful tonight.  As always.

Celeste looking wonderful. As always.

One of the first things I noticed about Robin was his height.  As my mother would have said if she could have made it here tonight, anything over six feet is just showing off – it’s unnecessary.  So, by virtue of his genetics - [Pause to acknowledge his towering parents:] Hello Tony and Bernadette – Robin is a show off.

The towering Wilsons next to another family for scale.

Another so called attribute of Robin’s we all know about is that he’s too smart.  Some other things he is too good at include: drawing, beard growing and spouse choosing.

One of Robin's totally insane drawings.

It's all real.

Robin passed my subtle tests of worthiness, showing great strength of character, devotion to Chloë and probably most importantly, wit.  Likely through some sort of cheating.

Chloë, I know that over the past few days you have often wished you were just married and not this bride everyone is making you out to be – that it’s been frustrating at the same time as you have had to acknowledge that you can’t control how people express themselves and the extent to which they follow your precise instructions.  So just to remind you that you really aren’t in control – after I am finished speaking something is going to happen up here that you didn’t plan.  [After my speech Chloë’s sisters sang Timon and Pumba’s part of ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ from the Lion King.]

"...our trio's down to two..."

But before that, a message to Robin:  Even though I couldn’t protect Chloë from you – I am now bound to protect you as well.  For that, I congratulate you.

Hugs all around.

Why I don’t really use Twitter: It’s doomed.

As everyone on the Internet has probably already heard, my BFF Chloe Filson recently accused me of being awful at Twitter on her popular egg-pun website Real Life Artist. As you can see by the below chart, she has detected that my nascent Twitter account is in fact maintained by a robot while my my blog, Flickr photostream and LinkedIn profile indicate a human being and my Facebook profile is questionable.  Below are her findings:

Figure 1: Chloe’s analysis of my social network activity. Click to expand.

She also provides the following pie chart of my 42 tweets to date:

Figure 2: Yucky pie made out of my robot tweets

So is it true that my Facebook and Twitter accounts are being maintained by robots?  That’s ridiculous!  And true.  Ridiculously true.  The only reason I joined Twitter because of the number of robots available to help me share the activity I care about to some of the networks I care less about.  My friend Dakshana has also called me out for using Twitter as my very own real life WUPHF.

I performed my own little analysis of Chloe’s 497 tweets since she joined the network on 21 February 2011.

Figure 3: Delicious pie made of Chloe’s tweets

As you can see in the above pie chart, most of Chloe’s tweets are about tea.  While I cannot claim to have done an actual study her tweets like she did of mine, I will claim that my pie is prettier than hers.  Just look at it.  Mine is all three dimensional and textured.  Just look.  It is true that Chloe used Twitter to openly conspire with Stephanie Doig about how they were going to call me out for being bad at Twitter, something I would have seen if I wasn’t so bad at Twitter.

So far Chloe’s campaign has earned six ‘likes’ on Facebook, one ‘like’ on WordPress and one supportive comment on the blog post while another commenter wants me to be his life coach even though he has a much better life (and blog) than me. That makes it a total of 10 people who openly care about by horrible tweeting.  Not a very impressive number, especially if you compare it to the 39 people who have joined the Facebook group “if 1 000 000 people join they will ban COLSLAW !!!!” [sic].  It is also interesting to note that most of the ten people who joined Chloe’s campaign are among those who I threatened by name in my speech at Chloe’s wedding.  Who knows what their true motives are.

Figure 4: The Internet doesn’t care that I am bad at Twitter

The end of Twitter is nigh and we know when

You know who else doesn’t want me to use Twitter?  The universe, that’s who.  Twitter is doomed.  This rest of this post is dedicated to the over 200 million registered Twitter users who have been investing this platform with their quips, insights and impersonations of Star Wars characters.

To do some research on the fate of Twitter, I partnered with Real Life Scientist and Real Life Chloe-husband Robin Wilson and his Real Life Buddy Berkley Staite.  In order to select an appropriate stand-in for Twitter in our doomsday calculations, Robin and Berkley provide the following analysis.  If you don’t understand it, that’s okay – you probably don’t have an advanced degree in science.

1) ‘Chloe Filson’ almost sort of rhymes with ‘Tony’s cinnamon bunn’.

Figure 5: Tony with his bunn

2) Tony built Monstro LAN-D, the fourth of seven LANs made up of ungodly tentacle networking and terrifying many-eyed hubs.

Figure 6: Montstro LAN-D

3) Monstro LAN-D was built by Pheer McQuink, a half-legged clock salesman.  His motto is “Would you like to buy a-HO-HO-HO-CLOCK?”

Figure 7: Pheer McQuink selling clocks

4) “HO-HO-HO-CLOCK” looks like a string of modified Starship Enterprises (from Star Trek) being pulled by CLOCK which is almost the same as Nugbert (both words are a single letter in height).

Figure 8: Nugbert pulls some Enterprises

15) Nugbert, the helpful ship-pulling clock, under the alias Sam-I-Am met Jean-Luc Picard on twitter, and they’re totally rad pals.

Figure 9: It all comes full circle

To review:

Chloe Filson = Tony’s cinnamon bunn = Monstra LAN D = HO-HO-HO-clock = Nugbert the clock = Twitter.  Chloe Filson is Twitter.  Twitter is Chloe Filson. 

Now that we have concluded that, the next question is as to the fate of Twitter now that we know that it is Chloe Filson.  Consider the following indisputable facts:

1) Chloe Filson = Twitter (see above).

2) Chloe was born on 6 December 1984 and died 27 August 2008 when I hosted a fake funeral for her instead of a going away party before she moved to Israel.  By that point she had lived 8,665 days.

Figure 10: Me delivering an eulogy at Chloe’s funeral next to her taxidermied corpse. 

3) In 1984, the average lifespan of a Canadian woman was 79.9 years.  Chloe therefore lived out only 29.7% of her lifespan.

4) According to Audubon Magazine reader and Twitter user Vernon Gauthier, the bird in the Twitter logo is a Blue Jay.

Figure 11: Blue Jay

Figure 12: Blue Jay

Figure 13: Blue Jay

5) The longest recorded lifespan of the Blue Jay is 16 years and 4 months.

6) Twitter launched on 15 July 2006.

7) According to her third grade Language Arts notebook, when Chloe was nine years old, she knew 12 monsters (see below table).  Now that Chloe is 26 years old, it is logical to presume that she must know 35 monsters by now if she has continued to follow the same pace of monster-knowledge.

Figure 14: Monsters Chloe knew at nine years old

Figure 15: Rate of Chloe’s monster-knowledge

Therefore:

29.7% [Chloe's lifespan fulfillment] x 16 years and 4 months [Blue Jay's lifespan] = 4.85 years or 1,776 days

4.85 years or 1,776 days + 15 July 2006 [Twitter's launch date] = 26 May 2011

So if Chloe is Twitter and Twitter is a Blue Jay, Twitter should have died on 26 May 2011.  It didn’t.  Clearly we need to add a correction factor.  This is where the monsters come in:

26 May 2011 + 35 monsters = 30 June 2011

That’s right – Thursday, 30 June of this year Twitter is going to end somehow.  Bold prediction?  Robin and I feel the math speaks for itself.

And that, Chloe, is why I do not really use Twitter.

Figure 16: Similarly good math from an xkcd comic

Comic about the distribution of awesome

My BFF Chloe Filson has finally started a blog called Real Life Artist, and as could be expected, it’s way better than mine.  She has started to post short comic strips based on email conversations that have amused her.  This first one is apparently based on an email conversation that I had and then forwarded to Chloe because it reminded me of her.  I could tell this because the character has my hair, glasses, shirt, nose and chest hair – not because I could remember the conversation.   My memory is really bad.

Click on the image to biggify it

Return to Yasothon

All of my 2003-2004 Baha’i youth year of service was to be in Macau, China but visa problems eventually led the government of that city to kick me out.  While on exile in mainland China I made arrangements to continue volunteering with the Thai Baha’i community.  I was sent to a small town in the North-East to help the local Baha’i youth with their children’s classes and other activities.  While there I also worked on the library at the Baha’i-inspired Santitham Witthayakhom School, had my first Songkran, learned to carve pineapples and almost Fasted to death.

Some of the most mind-blowing and eye-popping images were taken by be during my recent return there to scan pictures, I tell you.  Better pictures than I have ever taken – nay, will ever take.  I’m going to have to ask you to take my word for it because I accidentally deleted them.  Every last one.  To mark the stop and get closer to completing the documentation of my year away I have scanned and posted some of my old photos from 2004.  Click here to view them.

In related news, the semi-autobiographical rhyming illustrated children’s travelogue that I have been working on with my BFF Chloë Filson for the past three billion years is finally finished and will be consumable somehow somewhere at some point by someone.  The below drawing is one that I started back then in Yasothon and is the last one in the book.

For a more dramatic return, see my Return to Panchgani story from India.