Howie and me

I'll bet you have a Facebook account, dear Discerning Reader. Most people who spend any amount of time on the webiverse are assimilated eventually.

Facebook is a great way for busy people to stay connected to friends and family members without doing any real work to maintain their relationships. I check up on Facebook an average of once a day for a few minutes. For me it's a pleasant little diversion, but I'm not addicted to the site by any means. Many people are sucked into the world of Facebook and never emerge, which I think is kind of sad.

I only have 136 "friends" on Facebook as of today, so I'm not the most popular kid in the class by any stretch of the imagination. My wife Teri is more popular than I am, not that we're competitive or anything. She has 154 friends--still not very many, but she signed up for Facebook very recently, while I've had an account for a while.

Recently I signed up with Facebook's little cousin, Twitter. On most days I post to this blog, I'll leave a Tweet teasing the subject of the day. It's only on most days because I sometimes forget. It's kind of a pointless gesture as I have only the tiniest handful of followers on Twitter. It would only take me a minute longer to call each of my followers and read them my latest blog post.

I've had a couple of new people following me on Twitter in the last few days. I know this because Twitter sends me an e-mail when a new follower signs up. My latest follower, someone I know only as Sara, has me completely bamboozled. Sara is following only five people on Twitter--Anderson Cooper, Regis and Kelly, Mark Consuelos, Howie Mandel. And me. Okay, it's five accounts but six people if you count Regis and Kelly as two.

I had heard of all of these people except Mr. Consuelos. Anderson Cooper is a CNN anchor, Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa are the hosts of a popular morning television show, and Howie Mandel is the germ-phobic host of the game show "Deal or No Deal." It turns out Mark Consuelos is a semi-famous Spanish actor most noted for eloping with Kelly Ripa, the very same Kelly of Regis and Kelly. That's zero degrees of separation for Mr. Consuelos and Ms. Ripa, but where do the rest of us fit in?

How do I belong with that group of people, and what does my inclusion on this exclusive list say about me? How many degrees of mental separation does it take to connect me to Kelly Ripa, Anderson Cooper and Howie Mandel? It boggles the mind. It really does. Should I feel honored or what? I feel like I've been invited to a very odd B-list cocktail party by mistake.

This got me thinking. If every famous person in the world were on Twitter and I could follow only five, who would they be? Hmmm.

Well I know who I wouldn't start with--Barack Obama. It's not for any reason having to do with his politics or his personality--it's because following him on Twitter would be redundant. Mr. Obama somehow got my e-mail address during the last presidential campaign and he decided to become my pen pal. Now he e-mails me almost every single day telling me what he's doing and asking for my advice or for help with something he's working on. I never answer him, but he doesn't take the hint. He's actually kind of a pest. This week he sent me two personal e-mails thanking me for getting health reform passed, and I don't have the heart to bounce back and tell him that it wasn't my doing.

I'm flattered that the President of the United States is so personally involved in my life, but I feel a little guilty about it to tell you the truth. He could probably spend the time he uses writing e-mails to me on something a little more productive, like fixing the economy.

Okay, back to the five I would include. Hmmm.

1. Stephen King because he's a hugely popular writer and I'd love to know what he thinks about at random moments.

2. Tiger Woods because I'd like to know what he's really thinking.

3. Bill Murray because I think he was a great comic actor and he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.

4. Michael Palin because his diary of the Monty Python years was beautifully written but kind of long-winded. It would be fun to see what he could do with the constraint of 140 characters.

5. Anthony Bourdain because it's interesting to look inside an intelligent but dark mind.

6. Vladamir Putin because it's interesting to look inside an intelligent but dark mind.

7. Danica Patrick because the thought of a beautiful woman in a fast car is so alluring to so many men(including me), and I wonder what her real life is like.

Okay, that's what I came up with with about ten seconds worth of thought. I know it's seven, not five--sue me.

So, I'd really like to know, if you could follow anyone in the world, who would be on your list?