– RECAP – WEEK 7
ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS – An NFL’s star quarterback makes the news not with touchdowns and wins, but a retro hair-do. TV icon Bob Barker (“The Price is Right”) fainted. And Kenny McKinley, a second year player for the Denver Broncos, died from what may have been a tragic, senseless death During Week 7 of the POOKOOBOOK Twitter site feed.
The site can be found at http://www.twitter.com/pookoobook.
The site was created to tie in relevant news Tweets for the novel POOKOO by Illinois writer Doug Shiloh (http://www.dlshiloh.com). The goal was to find one relevant Tweet per week. So far, over 50 have been found.
“I wanted to write something that could be re-read and this has been good to see how it works out,” Shiloh said. “With this Twitter site, the tragic and the silly collide, just like in POOKOO.”
For instance, this week, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady made the news with a retro-styled long hair-do.
“In the book, pages and pages of forest are wiped out to wonder which hair style is best for the wife of the main character,” Shiloh said. “It’s another case of empty news.”
Shiloh knows something about the news game, having been a sports editor at a small town newspaper and the founder of a popular high school sports web site.
“There are things worth our time and attention and of course some silliness is OK, as a mental break, but often nowadays too much attention is on news that isn’t worth it, don’t you agree? The whole Lindsay Lohan thing, for instance; is she in jail, out, why, or who cares? You forget what the original point is of what a person does or once did. Same thing happens in POOKOO. He was a sports star and he loses sight of who he is.”
As far as the death of Kenny McKinley of the Denver Broncos, Shiloh said it was tragic and that “a death like that is hard to take for friends and family.”
POOKOO is available for free as a PDF download currently at http://pookoo.net. So far, 3,200 people have downloaded this satire of celebrity and sports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_McKinley
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