RT Means Re-Tweet - Yeah, you knew...

...but I just learned that today, while I followed the news out of Iran right on the Twitter site, here.

I've never used Twitter much. I signed up in April to follow Maria D, who was commenting on a conference we both attended (Great Circles). It was a great way to get her notes from all the talks we attended. Since then I've checked it out once or twice, but saw no reason to spend much time there.

This evening, Maria sent a chat message with the link above. I was amazed. My family laughs at me because I often don't know what's happening. I don't watch TV news (don't have a TV), and I don't read the daily papers. I didn't know when the Berlin Wall fell until weeks after it happened - I heard about it during a Thanksgiving dinner. There have been other equally big events that I learned about long after everyone else had tired of the discussion.

But this time I'll be able to tell them the news. And add to the depth, since of course the TV doesn't cover it in any real depth.

Here's a post by Robert Fisk, a veteran reporter on the Middle East.

And here's another blog post that talks about what young adults in America are learning about Iran from this.

One more and I'll sign off. This post is supposedly details about the vote count irregularities.

I haven't read any of these all the way through yet, and I'm not sure they're accurate (Fisk will be) or particularly good. But I got all 3 from the tweet stream, a first for me.

~~~

My prayers go out to the protesters. I was lying in bed imagining people all over the world holding hands through their cell phones, in support of the protesters. I was imagining guns that wouldn't work, police who couldn't shoot because their vision was clouded by tears in their eyes, and protesters not being noticed by police (just enough invisibility).