The Week on TwitterTopical

The Week on Twitter | Palin, Putin, and Penguins

By Jade Hayden

This week, Vladimir Putin probably poisoned someone, Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump, and we all celebrated Penguin Awareness Day. Twitter also went down for a bit, and then it came back up, just in time for What Women Want in 5 Words to become a hashtag.

#SarahPalin endorses #DonaldTrump, while blaming #Obama for her son’s arrest

Earlier this week, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. In a rather bizarre speech given at a rally in Iowa on Tuesday, Palin stated that she would be supporting Trump’s bid for the presidency in order to “do the right thing for this country” and to “make America great again.”

[youtube id=”RkKl-7Z1dg8″ align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no” maxwidth=”750″]

The whole speech was about twenty minutes long. In it, Palin discussed her distrust of Obama’s policies, Hillary Clinton, ISIS, the military, all those broken promises Obama made, war, how great Trump is, the troops, why Obama’s strategies are not working, and God. Typical Republican stuff, really.

It was when Palin’s speech turned to conservatism, and her critique of those who are not conservative enough, that just about everybody was forced to take a moment to consider just what she was actually talking about. The line “Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our god, and our religions, and our Constitution,” became a Vine, that Vine became a meme, and that meme added to the hundreds of other instances where we collectively stared at our laptops in bewilderment at Trump and co and wondered what the fuck was actually going on in America.

But the former Governor of Alaska didn’t stop at giving us all a bit of a laugh. In true Sarah Palin style, she also had to piss a lot of people off too. The following day at a rally in Oklahoma, she blamed Obama for his maltreatment of troubled war veterans, claiming that the lack of support they were receiving was leading to violence – most notably, in her recently arrested son, Track, who was charged with domestic abuse after getting drunk and waving an assault rifle around during a fight with his girlfriend.

Twitter went down, everybody tweeted about it #TwitterDown

On Tuesday, Twitter malfunctioned for a bit, lots of people freaked out, and Facebook actually became the social media outlet of choice for a period of time. According to re/code, the issue was because of an “internal code change,” meaning that someone wrote some dodgy code, and things quietly and quickly fell apart for awhile.

Twitter continued to have issues for about eight hours, which is a long time in website world, and an even longer time in the lives of the emotionally challenged addicts who can only express them accurately in 140 characters.

#VladimirPutin “probably” approved the murder of ex-Russian spy in 2006

This week, an inquiry found that Vladimir Putin was probably responsible for giving the okay to poison ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko a decade ago. The report found that in 2006, two Russian men deliberately added the radioactive substance polonium-210 to Litvineko’s drink while he was staying at a hotel in London.

The report stated that Putin is likely to have approved the murder, due to a level of “antagonism” between the two around this time.

Following the release of this information, Russian Twitter was dominated by the hashtag #PutinProbablyApproved, where citizens took it upon themselves to blame Putin for an array of crimes including the holocaust, slavery, the Iraq war, the destruction of the Death Star, and some guy’s indigestion.

https://twitter.com/NeinQuarterly/status/690253166177312770

https://twitter.com/twlldun/status/690144276114726912

Everyone becomes aware of penguins on #PenguinAwarenessDay

January 20th marks the annual celebration of Penguin Awareness Day – or, to put it simply, The Greatest Day Of The Year, Basically. It is a day where we all stop and have a bit of a think about how good penguins are, admire their inexplicable cuteness, laugh as they repeatedly fall over, cry as they leave the warmth of their parents’ pouches for the first time, applaud when they make their first journey to the sea, and quietly reflect at the end of it all about how utterly blessed we are to share a planet with such glorious creatures.

It’s a good day.

Twitter considers #WhatWomenWantIn5Words

During the week, #WhatWomenWantIn5Words trended for a bit. On the surface, it seemed like a recipe for disaster, and yet, most of the results were surprisingly tolerable. Some of them were even decent, and included pictures of pizza and other foods. Which was nice, and also accurate.

https://twitter.com/MustardCreams/status/689251243844354048

https://twitter.com/platinumjones/status/689235543960477697

Featured image source.

Jade Hayden 144 posts 0 comments

Jade Hayden has an MA in journalism, a degree in English, and a house rabbit who sleeps in her bed sometimes. You'll often find her wearing glasses, fixing her fringe, and complaining about the amount of time she spends on public transport. Jade is also the editor of HeadStuff's topical section, and she'd love if you sent your submissions over to [email protected].

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