Hockey: Washington Capitals fake Twitter Accounts and Hal Gets Into Shape

Posted by Hal
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So another hockey season is creeping up. Hockey is my sport. I’m not every good, admittedly, but that doesn’t stop me from lacing up the skates every chance I get. My beer league team’s first game is Sunday night. Unfortunately for me, a summer of travel and then a long vacation featuring a lot of haggis and scotch has left me in terrible shape. Ah well, all I can do is hit the ice and try to work it off.

I’m also a bit of a fanatic when it comes to following my favourite team The Washington Capitals. (I picked up the Caps bug when I lived in suburban DC as a kid.)

So here’s an article that brings peep culture and the Capitals together at last! It’s a piece in the Washington Post about fake twitter accounts aimed at Caps players. What’s particularly funny about the whole thing, or particularly sad, depending on your perspective, is that the fake accounts feature players the casual hockey fan would be hard-pressed to identify, guys like Jeff Schultz and Brooks Laich. You’d expect fake Ovechkin accounts, but Caps prospect Karl Alzner? Even I wouldn’t sign up to follow that. For the record, Ovechkin has his own Twitter account with some 20,000 followers, though as of January 09 he hasn’t posted, saying he’s “taking a break from all this.” Not too worry, though, there are plenty of fake Russian super-star hockey players ready to step into the mix: A quick search reveals, in total, 8 “Ovechkin” accounts, ranging from 5 to 5000 followers. A few of them are hard to distinguish from the real thing.

There is a serious element to all of this: while everybody enjoys celebrity impersonation on Twitter done as obvious parody, the fact is that it’s getting harder and harder to separate the real from the fake. Is peep culture folding back into itself? Have we reached the point where real life is getting boring again? I don’t think so: we will always privilege so-called “reality” over “fictionalized” content. Sticking with DC, on the all news radio last night I heard, for instance, that Obama called Kanye West a “jackass” for his embarrassing outburst at the MTV awards. This is news not because it matters, but because it’s real. (The comments were made off the record before an interview…surely by now the President should know that nothing’s off the record anymore.)

Well, let’s leave the last word to Washington Capital’s prospect Karl Alzner, who says in the Post article: “The weird thing is people talk about my girlfriend, my dog, weird stuff. They have too much time on their hands. It’s not right.”

The real Ovechkin Twitter page above.

A fake Ovechkin Twitter page below.

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The Bloggist

Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...

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