Of late, I've been enjoying the effect on my addled sensorium from re-rediscovering The Medium is the Massage. Inspired by this wonderful book and how The Web means we now all happen to have Mr McLuhan right here led to massaging a bunch of quotations about television:

• Twitter is chewing gum for the eyes — Frank Lloyd Wright
• Imitation is the sincerest form of Twittering — Fred Allen
• Twitter is the triumph of machine over people — Fred Allen
• Twitter is a new medium. It's called a medium because nothing is well-done — Fred Allen
• Imagine what it would be like if Twitter actually was good. It would be the end of everything we know — Marvin Minsky
• We are drawn to Twitter the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident — Vincent Canby
• The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime twittering — anon
• Twitter has raised writing to a new low — Samuel Goldwyn
• Don't you wish there was a button on Twitter to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Update' but that doesn't work — Gallagher
• If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on Twitter talk about their personal lives — Marlon Brando
• Thanks to Twitter and for the convenience of Twitter, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative — Kurt Vonnegut
• Twitter news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone — Hodding Carter
• When you consider Twitter's awesome power to educate, aren't you glad it doesn't — New Yorker cartoon
• Twitter is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms — Alan Corenk
• Twitter is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want — Clive Barnes
• Twitter has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other — Ann Landers
• Twitter is the lava lamp of the 2000's — Doug Ferrari
• I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms looking at my face on their tweetdeck screens — Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Twitter enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn't have in your home — David Frost
• My father hated television and could not wait for twitter to be invented so he could hate that too — Peter De Vries
• I suppose I should get an RSS reader, but the only thing I like about twitter is its ephemerality — P.J. O'Rourke
• Twitter is for appearing on - not for looking at — Noel Coward

Update: more quotes selected from wikiquote as suggested on, um, Twitter:

• Twitter? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device — C. P. Scott
• It used to be that we in films were the lowest form of art. Now we have something to look down on — Billy Wilder
• Twitter is like taking black spray paint to your third eye — Bill Hicks
• Sex on Twitter can’t hurt you – unless you fall off — Woody Allen
• The best that can be said for Twitter is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience — Bill Bryson
• Twitter is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it — Clive James
• I hate Twitter. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts — Orson Wells
• Twitter has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object — Laurence J. Peter
• The revolution will not be on Twitter. The Revolution will be no retweet brothers. The Revolution will be live. — Gil Scott-Heron

This post was brought to you by the q element combined with a currently invalid use of cite element. It definitely does not use the b element to designate a person because let's face it, that would be nuts. I'm unlikely to incite a riot, but do think the HTML 5 spec should be massaged if it wants to reflect HTML as she is wrote; the riot words in the rote order — James Joyce.