FROM A GOOPY FUTURE

You know how it is when you're freewheeling down an amber mountain early on a blue spring morning, you zone into the big picture and just pixel along... So it was with me when I went down to the station this a.m., and so it was as I went through the ritual of leaving my motorcycle, bending down in the same zone to put my helmet strap as usual into the helmet lock-- when there staring back at me from another world was a jade-shade frog, as comfy in his place atop the lock as I would be if I were still in bed. Seems I get a froggy stowaway every year at about this time.

Fortunately I had a bit of time to spare for some amphibian conversation, and it was a fine morning, so I asked if he was gonna move or what. He looked at me goggle-eyed as if I was another species, kidding him bigtime. He was hunkered on his magic shelf that flew like the wind, and he wasn't about to give it up. Would you? It had borne him in a windy twinkling from a hoppy, floppy lifestyle, with a goopy future, to a fresh beginning in a newer, harder and impressively technological world. Trains sped past above us; cars whizzed by out on the road, there was asphalt, and no mud! And here he was atop it all! These matters filled his dark eyes as he gazed at me with the somber expression that attends all amphibian revelations.

His magic shelf fitted him perfectly, as though he were glued to it at every key point, and not only physically; he looked almost melted in place. Not wanting to interfere with this radically new perspective to which he clung so tightly (or perhaps I was misreading it all, and he was awaiting a ride back home to his family of millions?), I tried to fit the strap into the lock by edging it in under his rear, but His Jadeness clearly did not intend to return upmountain: at the touch of the strap, with a froggy "Geronimo!" he leaped over my shoulder and onto the asphalt of the bike parking lot, astonished at this new hardness and dryness as he hopped about, taking in the variety of new perspectives.

He had made his start. And who knows but one day, when the world's predominant life form has long been amphibian, he will be the Adam of his kind.

I will be the absent footnote.

BLUE AND AMBER MOUNTAINS

Now that all the paddies have been tilled and readied for planting, the whole mountainside is water, waiting. Facets of water that combine to make quite a chunk of gem quality amber under the sun.

Today drove down the road that curls among the amber facets to the village, to use the village rice polishing machine for polishing our 30 kg of "Mother Lake" organic rice to just the degree of brownness we like.

While the rice was perfecting I stood outside in the finest part of the day, late afternoon, when at this time of year all is in brilliant color around here as the Lake-reflected light meets the sun slanting down the mountain. All the paddies down in the village are waiting too, and as I looked across their smooth mirrors I realized for the first time that from here, through a break in the bamboo and trees that rise on the other side, I could see across the Lake to pale blue Mikamiyama (Three-peak Mountain), also called Omi Fuji for its resemblance to Mt. Fuji (Omi being the old name for Shiga Prefecture) and, colloquialocally, Hachibuse (roughly, [contents of a] bowl turned over).

Then the rice was done.

NEXT TASK

Cleaning off some garden nets on this cold, cloudy and rainy but sometimes abruptly sunny morning great for rainbow surprises, I turned to scan the scene and decide on my next garden task when I saw, about 200 meters away, over the long slope of rice paddies terracing down toward the Lake, a cloud of large hawks - with those broad wings they can make quite a cloud - circling and diving all in one area, taking sudden turns diving out of sight behind a ridge-- likely a farmer over there tilling a paddy.

I love watching hawks, they make great eye food. There's also a centering magic in seeing the way they know the sky by heart, the way they show the invisible wisdom of the air itself in how they tweak their wings to ride it with such cavalier grace. I just stood there watching, finally letting my sleevepulling mind go gliding and diving on its own wings amidst the hawks, there against the green swoop of the mountainside.

Next task? What next task?

RAIN VALUE

As the heavy night rain continued into the morning I donned my trusty raincoat and boots, entered the big roar to check all the firewood covers, then the shiitake that must have emerged as a result of the big cascade. Found that the oldest logs had the greatest yields-- sorta like a lot of the elder folks I know.

On my way back to the house with all those mushrooms, I stopped to check on the garden where, in the windowed sunshine of yesterdays office, I'd hoped to work today. But thanks to the garden, all was cool. The nasturtiums were bouncing in their red and gold, the rainbow chard leaves were rising into the rain, their gleaming colors more vivid than the inanimate flash of gems; the lettuce was crisp to the eyes, the baby radishes and arugula were clearly enjoying this old life now new, bouncing the way babies do; the beansprouts were swollen with their tasks, never more at home; the ginger was still enjoying its sleep in the rain, like I had earlier this morning; the potatoes, baby tomato plants and carrots were straight up with green energy and the garlic was reveling in those moonstones of water like there was no tomorrow-- which I guess there isn't for vegetables, whose profession is to live nowhen but now. We humans have trouble doing that, except for such moments as when we watch a garden in the rain.

Rain reaches full value when you have a garden.

NATURAL EXERCISE

Yesterday, during the time I spent gardening, firewooding and rebuilding the stone wall, I estimate that I did a minimum of 100 squats and stands (planting and weeding), 20 leaps across rows, 50 heavy lifts (carrying rocks, wheelbarrowing, sacks of compost), 25 toe-touches (planting seeds), 50 left and 50 right lateral pulls (tilling), 50 overhead lifts (stacking firewood), 100 shovelings (dirt of stonewall and garden), a half hour of chainsawing and an hour of woodsplitting with a 3.2 kg splitting maul, all while walking and climbing a few kilometers in the process. Wonder if there's a gym I didn't have to travel to that could give me all that amidst actual birdsong in fresh mountain air and sunshine, for free, plus fresh organic vegetables and a new stone wall...

STONE SMILES

Here I am stonewalling again, building a dry stone wall - or rather, in this case, rebuilding a dry stone wall - for the first time in about 15 years. The wall was hastily built by the city fellow I was 15 years ago, so it didn't last well. A well-built stone wall should be able to last at least a thousand years, a duration more familiar to me now. I'm rebuilding the wall as the retaining wall for a new kitchen herb garden we're starting; we've outgrown the older small one.

It gets infectious, once you start building a stone wall, after you've learned how. It's like a puzzle, with all the pieces secretly scattered all over the place, and maybe elsewhere too. You keep your eyes peeled wherever you go, you develop an eye for rocks. Mainly, though, I'm dipping into the stony equity I've built up in one corner of our property, treasures I've dug up in getting the land to say vegetables and flowers instead of who the hell are you?

My stones are not the nambypamby perfectly lapidary sedimentary kind laid down gently by quiet valley streams over eons, that split and stack like Lego; mine were formed in primordial fires and planetary upheavals long before there was any need whatever for stone walls, so they are stubbornly hard and shaped the way they damn well want to be shaped, which makes my big wall puzzle interesting. Sometimes it takes hours, even days, of looking out of one eye while doing something practical, to find just the right stone (or close enough) for the uniquely shaped space available in the rising wall. I've got the first course of of big stones down and tilted just so, and am starting on the second course, which is when it begins to get tricky because from now on I've got to cover the seams, or at least not extend them straight up and down.

The big trick is to be as patient as the stones themselves, to think and act in rocktime, which was an unknown factor for me when I first came here from the city, where everything was right now and on schedule. I wanted my stone wall now too, so I got a city kind of wall. It didn't last long, due to a few other factors that must be considered in metamorphic stone wall building, such as rain, ice and the earth. Humantime hurry, apart from resulting in a wobbly wall, will also pinch your fingers and toes all the way down the line, to say nothing of what it does to your back.

But it's a pleasure learning to go and then going at a stone's pace, scanning all the stone faces for the one that smiles at you with the very shape of that gap you have in mind.

HAND ME THAT UMBA

Think about it. About language. Imagine way back in your own language, before it existed, back where you can't even use words to think about it, it's just pure thought there at the beginning when no one said anything, everybody just breathed, and just breathing was enough for an eon or two, then one day something clicked in the mind of one individual and in an early form of illumination a light went on.

She now saw (it was most likely a she, we're talking deep nuance here, after all, and she had heard her baby say ma-ma; the guys were likely out cracking rocks together or running after mammoths, other essential learning tasks) some radically efficient modality, a way to simplify yet introduce/embody a new realm of complexity, a new spiritual reality or whatever, there were no words for it yet, which was part of the just-dawning problem, the neochronic need to codify memory and whatnot--

In any case, the lingomother suddenly saw the gateway, decided to name something, pointed at an item of frequent daily use (it must have started with a practical aspect, necessity being the mother etc.) and said: "Umba!" the first intentional word. Before her oddly puzzled colleagues she pointed again at the item, more insistently this time, and said: "Umba!" Then she watched the light come on in their eyes, heard the nickel drop in those brains and language was born in their smiles of sudden understanding of what had just happened. And it was cool. Thus that item of frequent daily use within that small linguistic startup group became "umba." And so it still is today, somewhere, if only in the etymology.

But go from there to: "No not that umba; that one-- the green one with the new audio jack-- the one I got at Circuit City. BTW, have you seen the umbas with system 94.0 and 1500 gigs of RAM? Free holomovies online, Dude!"

How the hell did we get all the way here?

PLAN D

The monkeys are doomed. Not doomed in the same way as, say, the US dollar, but doomed relative to their success at enjoying my onions ever again. In that sense, they are freaking doomed. Which is fine with me.

Sympathetic but monkeyless readers may recall my most recent attempt to thwart the hairy brigands' lust for my vegetal equity, which attempt met with some success in that it made the monkeys work a bit harder for their free banquet at my expense. However, I have no wish to be a comprehensive monkey charity for the rest of my life; hence Plan D. (After Plan Z, I go alphanumeric, then on into hyphenation.)

My experience with Plan C got me to thinking, though, which is occasionally good. While considering solutions involving electricity, explosives, lasers etc., but preferring to try simpler and cheaper solutions first, I came up with the thought that if I could somehow extend the upper reach of the net beyond the poles and attach it to some kind of flexible rod, placed so as to bend slightly outward, it would then be impossible, would it not, for the monkeys to climb over the net... The more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, plausibility generally being like that box in the corner that could contain a million dollars.

The rods would have to be pliable, strong and not bend permanently, like wire. I searched for whatever it might be, but no luck-- I appeared to be the only one around here in quest of such a thing. Then a monkeyless but sympathetic friend found this on the net:

As you will observe, the plan fits my scheme perfectly. Someone else has not only already been there, monkeywise, they have produced the device! The dansei (flexible) pole, or Danpole! As you see, it does the job I imagined, leading the unsuspecting monkeys to fall some distance onto their heads. The sight pleases me.

The trouble is, the farmstores around here neither have nor have ever heard of such poles, though the stores deal with manymonkeyed farmers. Go figure.

As a side note, to show you what an uphill fight this all is, during my research for Plan D I came across this sickeningly biased news item on the net:

"But while their unique lifestyle has brought fame, the rest of Japan's snow monkeys lead very different lives, enduring incredible hardships as they fight for survival in their beautiful but unforgiving mountain home." Poor little hairy marauders. "Fight for survival" my turnips. "Unforgiving" my onions.

How about: "But while Brady's hard-won lifestyle has as a result of red-faced simian brigandage brought him no onions or turnips, to say nothing of pumpkins or cucumbers, he persists in seeking to lead a different and more fruitful life, enduring incredible hardships as he fights for survival in his beautiful but unforgiving mountain home." That's way closer to reality, if you ask me.

Hey you traitorous reporters, about a little sympathy for members of your own species, huh? Anyway, Plan D goes into effect as soon as I can get those Danpoles. Then those monkeys are way doomed, no matter what some well-onioned reporter says.

U.S. DISTRIBUTION OF TARANOME
(DEVIL'S WALKING STICK)!!

I had no idea it grew in the US... Even in NY!
Should be ready to harvest about now...

(Click photo for more info)

DEEP WEATHER

Another of the hundreds or thousands or millions if not billions of things I like about living up here on the mountainside is that we get so much more weather. And thicker. We get way more weather than they do down in the village or elsewhere on the flatlands, and I love weather. I love living so close to the thunder. Often by the time we get down to the bottom of the mountain the weather has faded away, and what they have down there is some watered-down version.

A few days ago an elder farmer friend who has a paddy down by the village stopped by to visit and view my ongoing antimonkey efforts (he got a good chuckle out of it), said he bet we get a LOT of wind up here... I hadn't thought about it in exactly that way, but he's right. Usually when it gets windy, we're the only ones up here.

It comes with the view. Strong weather. Deep weather. Not the shallow pallid lowland stuff they get on the ground, with the wispy fogs and wishywashy rains, slushy snows and clouds way high above: we get the storms right around our heads, with extra rain and snow, wind and fog, you should see the fog, you can't see a thing! Down in the village they can see their hands in front of their faces; up here the weather is so thick in a good fog you can't even tell you have eyes.

And the wind: wow, we get it straight from the source, direct and intact, unbent by buildings and whatnot, brushed clean by forests and polished to airy brilliance by whole mountainsides. We humans need a lot of weather by nature, I think-- good weather, varied weather, strong, deep weather, to keep us topped up, and up here we live right in it, like getting your water straight from the spring, not from way downstream...

Up here is where the weather happens first.

FASTFORWARD

TTER, now in beta, is our new social picoblogger messaging utility for staying hypermetaconnected with everyone else in real time by reducing the bulky and time-consuming 100-plus words about this very moment to a more manageable 20 character limit that only deals with genuine essences. No more fingerplodding for tedious seconds along the keyboard to tap out your text message to all the world about running out of sugar, or that new wart.

As we move beyond beta we'll be steadily intensifying your perceptions by miniaturizing the mundane in a series of planned decrements, from the revolutionary TTER to the neoinstantaneous TER, then the chronocrunching ER and on to the incredibly mere R, beyond which, for the good of all humankind on the go go go we will advance at last to the ultimate communication experience, which we hope will subsume the net and the world beyond in the complete absence of presence, where in optimal technomundanity you won't say a word, you'll just watch each other live, 24/7.

Initially, we'll call it PEEPER.

It's shrinking faster than I expected.

HOW IN THE HEART

Yesterday after lunch, for our hanami we went walking south among blossoming cherry trees ephemeralizing at the feet of mountains, sweeping in curves and mounds along hillsides and riverbanks of beauty beyond artistry, waning even as we watched, the petals falling in that wistful elegance the heart knows well...

Then when we got back home in midafternoon we went to gather taranome, the king of sansai, where it grows in some secret places. Last week we'd gone to check on the buds and decided to leave them for another week, which put us on a special kind tenterhook, since there's a good chance in the meanwhile that some other sansai gatherer who knows where the thorny trees are will come along with every right to take the buds - they are wild and free, after all - plus, there are mountain hikers passing near all the time who may spot and are not above even breaking the branches to get at the delicious tender buds to have with their camp dinner. But we went back and found them all untouched and got a good bagful, not taking all, the trees now so tall that I have to use my extendable pruner to reach a few meters up. Next year the upper buds will be beyond reach.

The wait was worth it. The buds were the perfect size, just beginning to open. Had them tempura for dinner, fresh as you can get, best taranome I've ever had, until next year.

How in the heart, the cherry blossoms fall...

WISH I COULDA SEEN THE LOOK ON HIS FACE

Musta been a monkey did this, there was no wind yesterday and that high firewood stack was straight and well built, I checked and tweeked it a week ago when the winds were strong, a monkey - must have been a big monkey - jumped down hard from one of the big cedars onto to the top of the stack, which was mostly oak and heavy, some beech and cherry in there, and had likely the surprise of his life when under the impact of his weight the entire solid precipice toppled with him on top and descending fast, the whole load no doubt sounding off like a giant marimba, the pieces clacking and whacking, bonging against each other as the whole thing settled into the high mound of randomized wood that I spotted this morning while I was watering the garlic, radishes, arugula and lettuce, that end of the garden, so as soon as I was finished watering I started rebuilding the interwoven vertical support end of the stack, using the big chunks of oak lying about, but it was getting to be hot work in the near-noon sun so I decided to finish the rest later, after we got back from our trip to soak up some vast seas of cherry blossoms.

That monkey's face woulda been great to see too.

OLD CRIMES, NEW NAMES

I bet the suits who sit around a table in a secure boardroom somewhere and come up with new names for old crimes had a big laugh among themselves when they came up with the latest euphemism for general and ongoing theft of your income.

As all the possibilities raced around their one-track minds, they likely threw out suggestions-- some of them serious, like 'Terminal EconoCare, 'or 'Painless Extraction,' some of them comical, like 'Fiduciary Exuberance' or 'Beltway Robbery.' Then they'd chuckle for a while and get back to pondering over coffee amid discussions of the psychoeconomic aspects of optimally deceiving the cashcow electorate, who have always done all the backbreaking work needed to actually create actual goods and actually earn actual money.

It wasn't that the econoguys were feeling at all bad about the idea of deceiving the public one more time, it was just that they had to give the official kleptoproject a name - that was part of their taxpayer-funded job - but they didn't want John Q to figure out what was really going on with the money; plus, there's always the aesthetic aspect to such efforts, of creating a classic bit of copy or a catch phrase that pulls the wool over in excellent fashion, like Ask Why, or Liebensraum, or Mission Accomplished...

Then at some point in one of those econocreative brainstormings, one of the participants threw out the term "Quantitative Easing" and the whole table just cracked up at the deceptive beauty of it, how not only was the phrase sufficiently opaque to befuddle Joe Sixpack and beguile Sam Lunchbox-- the reporters and anchors would eat it up! It was perfect!

They figured that with the right tone and spin, the Sixpacks and Lunchboxes of the land - who were too busy worrying where their next dollar was coming from anyway - would just think that the project had something to do with the quantity of-- something comfortable, something helpful that the government was doing, sort of like handing out easy chairs, when what it actually meant was that the Federal Reserve, a private corporation with no reserves, was going to print a few quadrillions of completely paper money out of nothing, so that the value of each dollar in the taxpayers' bankbooks and pensions would eventually go down to the basement of value, and the Sixpacks and Lunchboxes and their kids would have to work it all off (plus the econoguys' and their buddies' bonuses) without even knowing it! They'd say stuff like: "Boy, these bills are sure piling up, I'm gonna have to get a third job, things are really getting expensive, looks like you'll have to give up college," the same way they say "Boy it sure is raining!"

"Quantitative Easing": what a laugh there must have been around the table at that moment.

You gotta wonder if the trick is gonna work, but that's why they don't teach finance in high school.

CHERRY MOODS

Yesterday was a day off, and when I walked out into the garden in the early morning the cherry tree was like a different person, it was so polite and considerate in its pinkly fluent majesty-- not a trace of irony anywhere in its blossomy mannerisms or the gestures of its elegant limbs; its perfume even had my name on it.

As I worked in the garden in the rich morning air the tree's blossom-clad limbs hovered over me considerately, shading me from the sun, the entire tree emanating a magical light blended effortlessly from the basic materials of sun and blue sky-- it made working in the garden even more of a pleasure than usual.

But then this morning, when again I had to head downmountain and off to work in the Big City, as I passed through the village the arcade of blooming cherry trees that lines the road to the station looked pretty flippant, flaunting their whole roadful of perfumed beauty in the same saucy and ironic way they had on Tuesday.

The cherries have really been moody lately. Either that or the mere prospect of an office can warp reality.

SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY

Pure Land Mountain is seven years old this month. Here's a post from way back then:

SEEDS OF CHANGE

Yesterday, out in the fine gold spring day tilling and planting spinach, I kept being distracted by loud poppings here and there in the sky, thinking them perhaps to be monkeys gathering and eating seeds in the trees or something, or maybe birds, or the trees themselves stretching in the warmth of spring, or...

Here and there the popping continued, catching at my ear like a mosquito, so finally I gave up and went off toward the heart of the matter, where I stood in the road near the nearest of the places whence the popping had come like some slow-motion popcorn, and... POP! POP!! I saw no monkeys, I saw no birds, I saw-- movement only, up in the trees, it was like a big slow stretching, a sudden twitch, a rush of tangle, a thrash, a solid sprinkling--

It was the wisteria pods unleashing their seeds in the warmth of the sun, the rise of the sap and the touch of the spring winds, all come together at the right moment and WHAP!! A pod would unleash, twist like a sling and shoot off its lifebullets--

Just as I was wondering how far they could travel, WHANG! one hard brown flat seed struck the metal fence near me and came to rest by my foot. I picked it up and threw it a good deal farther on, changing the universe forever.

CHERRY TREE SARCASM

As I was climbing on the motorbike early this morning for the trip down the mountain to await the high-speed train that would take me encased in steel to a girdered office high in the heart of the big city where I would spend all day wrangling with billions of bytes of bits, the newly blooming cherry tree in our garden stood in majesty beneath the pale blue sky, pink blossoms alight with the gold of the morning sun, their delicate fragrance borne to me on the same soft spring breeze that moved the tree's blossom-laden boughs in what I took to be a distinctly sarcastic gesture under the circumstances.

In the mockery of rich morning air, laden with all the Spring countryside fragrances that take time and focus to fully distinguish and savor, the tree persisted in waving to me, its arms derisively full of soft, short-lived blossoms, in effect saying in its arboreally ironic way Goodbye, Bob! Sorry you have to miss all this! Have fun in the office today! I'll take care of all the beautiful and fragrant things while you're hacking at important keyboard stuff or whatever! See you tonight, in the dark!

Cherry tree sarcasm can be vicious.

McSOUL

"A Tokyo subsidiary of Hello Kitty maker Sanrio, Kokoro -- which means heart or mind in Japanese -- has also produced advanced talking, life-size humanoids.

'Robots have hearts,' said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota.

'They don't look human unless we put souls in them.

'When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That's when we know our work is done.'

So even the soul is getting dumbed down. Seems they have pallets of souls in the parts department. Somehow it comes as no surprise that this is a Hello Kitty subsidiary...

THE BEANS OF INFINITY

What do you get the little granddaughter who wants everything?

This question of the ages, times three in my case, arose when Echo informed me that she was planning a trip north to spend a few days with Kasumi and the three grandies, where she now is, while I revel in the joys of big city officedom.

I had a couple of days to think about the question, and decided that for each of the three girls I'd get a present that Echo could give them, gifts that would have to: cost less than I wanted to spend, be light enough for Echo to carry, require no batteries, withstand the brutal impact of three converging childhoods, have unique appeal, be something off the wall, be something they would like, be something that wouldn't initiate intertrio warfare (Yours is Better!)-- the list appears to be infinite, I'd better stop here.

Grandparents are always on the lookout for goodies that the grandies might enjoy, and I had recently heard of the Mugen Puchipuchi (mugen: infinite; puchipuchi: an onomatopoetic term used to indicate a small popping sound), a small handheld device that relieves stress by endlessly reproducing the nanopleasant effect of popping the bubbles on bubble wrap. I bought one of these, but Echo commandeered it.

Unfortunately it needs batteries, but it led me to another infinite product, a descendant of the Mugen Puchipuchi: the Mugen Edamame. I had never fully recognized the nanopleasure it was to squeeze out those shiny little green beans from their pod... Wow. Are these products ever indefinably Japanese...

So first chance I got I went to the nearest mugen-potential emporium and looked in every nook and cranny, but found only ONE Mugen Edamame; they were sold out. This would not do-- with only one pod - even though infinite - there would be skirmishes, battles, war. So I gave up on that for the moment, but discovered that the mugen company had recently introduced another infinite nanopleasure product, the Mugen Periperi (onomatopoetic term for a gentle tearing sound), which endlessly reproduces the nanopleasure of ripping that little cardboard strip off the top of a snack box. One somehow feels the urge to advise the ripper to "Get a life," but one is busy squeezing beans.

I decided to buy some pin-on buttons as a backup, since infinite soybeans seemed to be sold out everywhere, but what kind of buttons do you get for little girls, nothing treacly I decided; rather, something farly out that will inspire their inquisitive natures, no not the beautiful green marijuana leaf on a black background... I got that one to put on my beret, next to the Thoreau button. Nor that Che Guevara button... I got that one to put next to Mr. Natural on the other side of Thoreau. How about a Rolling Stone tongue button?Right next to the marijuana leaf would be good... this peace button too... do I have room for that? I didn't seem to be getting anywhere on my grandgirl gifts, so I picked out three pink vibrant flashy heart buttons.

The next day, in a last-ditch effort at infinity, after work I went to what must be one of the world emporiums for mugen itemage: Loft in Osaka. There on one of the upper floors I found the real thing, the original Mugen edamame, but they were selling fast. I grabbed a handful and fought my way to the counter, paid and they were mine. In each of the three presentbags for the girls, I finally put in one Mugen edamame and a heart button, an RS tongue button or a peace button, the recipient to be determined randomly by the order in which Echo took them out of her bag.

I can now rest, for stress relief is mine. They also sell an infinite beer can.

APRIL FOOL IN A WORLD ATWITTER

"A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!'; 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?'"

The Guardian Goes Completely Twitter