Body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch

"The first text message was sent Dec. 3, 1992, when British engineer Neil Papworth sent an early ''MERRY CHRISTMAS'' from his computer to a colleague's mobile phone. It wasn't Samuel Morse's telegraphed ''What hath God wrought?'' or even Alexander Graham Bell's sublimely mundane telephone request, ''Mr. Watson - come here - I want to see you.'' But Papworth's concise, two-word greeting was the harbinger of a communications revolution that has encircled the globe." (click link for the reference to this quote)

My friend told me - via text message, of course - that her predictive text brings up "ho" before "in" when she presses the '4' and '6' keys on her phone (probably a Razor - everyone has those these days). I told her - via text message, of course - that it shows what our world has come to. Folks no longer want to be "in with the in-crowd as much as they want to be ho with the ho-crowd." She responded, "I had no idea that predictive text was a barometer on the state of the world." (Then she somehow segued into a text message about how a bird is chirping outside her window and that Oprah has a nice butt. Yes, all that in the same text message.)

I like text messages more than a friend. My text message plan is more important that how many minutes I get, or whether or not I "roll over" (which, by the way, I do). So many good jokes can come from it. One time, my friend was using the phone of our friend who was uptight about her text message numbers. So, we would send our messages one letter at a time or with only the first letter of the words in our message - which made it so we had to waste (her word, not ours) more of her text messages by asking each other what the sentence was, then making the other guess.

Another time, I had a friendship that was founded on text messages. We would often talk about what awesome text messagengers we were because we messaged in complete words and sentences. One day, I sent her only text messages that were abbreviated words - or shortcuts, if you will. Stuff like:
r u cool 2day?
wut r u up 2?
I just 8 lunch
Those aren't direct quotes from that day, just examples of stuff I might have written. Anyway, she was pretty mad.

But, I think there is a downside to text messages. And not just that some fools refer to it as 'texting' or talk of receiving 'a text'. Instead, I advocate calling it 'messaging' or being a patient person not afraid to say the entire name of something and call it a 'text message' (some day, this blog will discuss the heinousness of abbreviations - I promise). I digress. Really, I do. Text messaging has turned me into what I have labeled a "One-liner" personality. I can no longer write a long essay on anything anymore because after two or three sentences, I run out of thoughts. Also, not since reading the Bible has something affected my near-perfect spelling like messaging has - due mostly to my reliance on predictive text (T9).

Part of the purpose of this blog is to give me practice on writing longer ramblings about whatever. Hence, the long (and perhaps boring) blog posts. Thank you for reading. I really hope it will get better. Last week, I expressed - via a text message, of course - disappointment that one of my earliest commenters hadn't commented lately and feared that I had bored him to death. The response I got - via text message, of course - was:

"Manfoom is like the lord. He'll always be there."

I hope so. I sure do.