Nothing makes people feel better in 2012 than being right...and doing it in the forum of Twitter is the ultimate conquest, it seems.
J knows this, but some of you don't- I don't live on Twitter...don't even have an active FB account and generally think these forms of media are colossal wastes of time...on a day-to-day basis.
But during big news times, I'm on Twitter in pretty large chunks as information is disseminated quickly this way. But, just as it is on a normal day, the news is not always correct...even if it comes from mainstream media source (*gasp* that shocks some of you, I'm sure).
So this morning, I woke up early to exercise, but decided to check Twitter first to see if there were any storm updates. I ended up wasting 1.5 hours on the Twittermachine instead.
There were plenty of updates on Sandy- the seas were higher off of the coast of NY and NJ than they had ever been recorded...flooding and power outages are rampant in the Northeast...and a noteworthy sidebar: the Army decided to stand guard in front of the tomb of the unknown soldier through this historical storm. I loved reading and seeing this.
After seeing links posted by a few weather people on the east coast, I reposted the photo...turns out, the photo that many members of the media are using is from September. But, since I decided to sleep and am far from a Twitter maven, I missed the news that this ancient photo had gone viral. My bad.
I actually do appreciate the way some of you guys handled this on Twitter- pointing it out is probably the best possible thing to do- so thanks to most of you who were trying to save me from myself.
But tact still matters to me...and while it's tough to have any tact in 140 characters or less, it still is possible (as a few of you exemplified). Perhaps it's because I'm in my late-30s...but I still read abrupt comments as rude...I'm old, I'm told, and that's what old people do. And as J reminded me this weekend, my mentality is probably at least a decade (or more) older than my actual age.
My point is, I'm extremely sorry for breaking a Twitter rule and posting this photo 15 hours after it was found to be from an entire month ago. 15 hours in 2012 Twitter time is like two years to many of you who live and die by this medium...and I have sinned against the gods of the interwebnet...namely many of you. Mea culpa.
All that said, the guys that stayed and guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier are still badasses...and my lack of vetting a photo shows how much of a hack I really am, I guess.
As I've always said, I'm not a member of the real media...so mistakes like this aren't normal for me*.
I should have posted this instead.
*zing
