Pulling for ya; we're all in this together

Don't criticize what you can't understand. It's always seemed like a good rule, one the sports journalists of a certain vintage would do well to follow (maybe they need Red Green, sitting his workshop: "I wanna talk to all you middle-aged hockey writers out there.")

There's no malice here, but it tickles the giggly to see, just one day after joking about how it is already passe to comment on Twitter (it's No. 24 from Stuff Journalists Like), that globesports.com's David Shoalts kind of morphed into Sam the Eagle -- is nothing sacred?! -- over the fake Brian Burke on Twitter. Granted, everyone else saw the fake Burke saying stuff lines such as, "Wade Redden looks disinterested, worn down and flat out terrible against the Leafs tonight. Or, as he calls it, playoff form,' " as pretty scandalous, if scandalous is a synonym for mildly amusing.

(Update: Sean at Down Goes Brown has confessed it was him; there is more at Puck Daddy. It will all come out in the wash, or hogwash.)

Shoaltsy, though, kind of lost it:

Leaf president and general manager Brian Burke is the wounded party this time, as someone has been impersonating him on Twitter, a social-networking and mini-blogging service. Twitter allows its users to send and read short posts, functioning as a message board for those who think, for some unfathomable reason, their random thoughts need to be inflicted on others.

Shoalts has a point. People have been doing way too much of inflicting random thoughts on each other for the the one to two hundred thousand years. Please stop sharing your random thoughts, unless you're claiming Raleigh isn't a hockey market because a security guard didn't know a team's lineup off by heart:

"During the Hurricanes' morning skate on Friday, a security guard approached a man sitting in the stands. 'Excuse me, sir,' he said, 'are you with the Leafs or Hurricanes or the media?'

" 'Well,' the man said, 'I'm with Bret Hedican.'

" 'Who's he?' the guard said." - some guy, April 28, 2006

Point being, technology is only that to people who were born after it existed, different people have peculiar tastes and anyone with a room-temperature IQ could see it was not actually Brian Burke. It is passe (and pedantic putzery if ever it was) to make this point. At least Jeff Blair gets it:

"So they have me Twittering, and today we're going to start up a new blog called Unwritten Rules. We'll see how it goes. The online world is a lot of fun."