So, yesterday I read a news story about a Tampa woman jailed for feeding bears. (She’s an idiot. But there are ways of dealing with idiots that don’t involve throwing 81-year-old women into jail without bond. Somebody in the chain of events should have found one of those ways.)
In my self-appointed role of “curating the Internet, one tweet at a time,” I posted a tweet about it. Usually, I’ll cut-and-paste a quote from the story, but this time, I composed my own inflammatory summary, the exact wording of which doesn’t appear anywhere in the article:
81-year-old woman leaves birdseed outside for animals on her property. Jailed without bond. In America. http://t.co/sbQk8PmG8R
— Stephen Fleming (@StephenFleming) February 1, 2014
That got some attention. 35 retweets! Apparently, one of my retweeters caught the attention of Erick Erickson (who does not follow me… yet) and he re-retweeted it to his 100,000 followers.
Then, this morning, I saw this on the Drudge Report:
And, sure enough: almost the exact same wording that I composed (just changing “leaves” to “left”), linking to the same article.
JAILED WITHOUT BOND: 81-year-old woman left birdseed outside for animals on her property… http://t.co/68ECKhNtCq
— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) February 2, 2014
Coincidence? Possibly. But, given the wording, I think the linkage was via Twitter: me to @instapundit to @EWErickson to @Drudge.
I’ll try not to let the fame go to my head.
I say you made it. 🙂
Power of Twitter