Theledge.net

Or, disparaging a dog.

Angie and I are not twitter users. It isn’t that we don’t like twitter... It’s that we don’t understand twitter.

Ok, not really. It is more that we have the belief that saying something meaningful takes time, if only to develop the idea, and that neither of us has the time to type out meaningless messages, nor the time to dedicate to carefully crafting meaningful messages.

Having said that, we do use the internet, and are therefore exposed to a variety of internet themes, including some of the various ideas that percolate out of the twitter community.

Alphie, without a twitter account and with very little internet access, shouldn’t be particularly familiar with the memes that float from that region of the internet.

Somehow, she is aware of this, though:

That is a piece of art titled “Lifting Up a Dreamer” by Yiying Lu. Ever since Twitter used it as an icon to indicate problems with their site, it has been known as as the “Fail Whale”.

And today Alphie referenced it to express some problems she was having with Buddy. While she and Bettie sat on the bathroom floor within a few feet of Angie, Buddy wandered over, lured by the fact that clustered distributions of people increase the probability of food or attention.

Unfortunately, his tail is now at the level where it is a big problem for Alphie when she is sitting on the floor. And Buddy’s enthusiasm for the family meant his tail was swinging pretty hard.

And thus spoketh Alphie, summoning the strategies of the internet:
“Buddy, you are a Fail Whale, with a Fail Whale tail!”