Last night as I was watching Alabama basketball and listening to OHS play-off football, both of which ended well, I experimented with Twitter. I opened an account a couple of years ago, so long ago that I had forgotten my user name and password. After searching old emails I found them.
I was all a-twitter.
The only tweet I had previously uttered was 490 days ago. All it said was "test." I recall that was the last time I thought I should experiment with Twitter. I had problems with the Twitter concept. What could I possibly tweet that was worth my time and anyone else's time to type or read in the space of 140 characters? I still don't know. However, it is possible to post my tweets to this blog-site, as you see on the right. I'm not sure how I will use it, but we'll see. It seems like a cool thing to do.
Last night as I began my experiment, I was trying to tweet about the Alabama basketball game. Tony Mitchell began the game playing above the rim as he is known to do, slamming the ball down through the hoop after swinging on the rafters of the gym. In an effort to tweet colorfully, I attempted a simile to describe Mitchell's antics. I tweeted, "Tony Mitchell has more dunks than a brush arbor revival." It was a clever reference to creek baptisms that often occurred after such events, during which the baptisee was dunked under the water.
But after I tweeted, I noticed that I had not said that at all. My tweet said, "Tony Mitchell has more sinks than a brush arbiter revival."
I did not appear nearly so clever as I had planned. Colorful, maybe, but not clever. More like nonsensical.
Auto-correct. It will be the downfall of modern civilization.
It didn't recognize "arbor" or "dunks." It is illiterate. For your information it does not recognize "fecal matter" either. That ruined a clever text about the movie "Rango."
And when you need its help, where is it? No, I did not mean that your signature must be acknowledged by a "Notary Pubic." Where the L was auto-correct then?
Auto-correct can be a source of embarrassment and pain to the one it is supposed to serve. It is not given the ability to think. It just follows the rules it has been given.
That leads to unintended consequences.
In Tuscaloosa, the home of the other Robert Bentley, Alabama governor and primary advocate of the Alabama immigration act, a visiting employee of Mercedes Benz was arrested Friday under the Alabama immigration law and taken to jail. He was a German member of a management team here for a few days. He was released after one of his colleagues retrieved his documentation from his hotel.
It appears that the arresting officer followed the law to a T. The German visitor was driving a rental vehicle with an improper tag. The officer stopped the car and asked for identification. The driver did not have it with him. The officer arrested him and took him to jail. The law gave him no choice. If he did not do everything he could to fully enforce the immigration law, the officer was subject to legal sanctions. He was just following the rules he must observe.
Unintended consequences.
This guy was German, not Hispanic.
Need a special session to correct that one.
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