Desipio is so old that when it started there wasn’t any social media. It’s not like Twitter made me more of a smartass, it just allowed me to inflict it on more people. Such is the price of fame that it occasionally comes back to bite people. Like when the Cubs banned me from Twitter four years ago. I’d say “fuck them if they can’t take a joke” but it turns out they can’t, and I was the one who got fucked.
Here’s the tale in all its glory as retold last May.
—
Twitter is announcing some big changes they’re going to roll out over the next few weeks. Once they are complete you’ll be able to post photos, videos and .gifs without it taking up your character count. You’ll be able to spam the shit out of people on the Interwebs because Twitter handles will no longer use up your character count, either, even when you use them in a replay. You’ll be able to retweet yourself so…oh, god, that’s going to be the worst. Except it will make sharing this over and over again, easier. Right now you have to cancel your old retweet on it to retweet it again, and it’s Internet gold.
spanking it
— Jed Hoyer (@JedHoyer_) April 14, 2009
To celebrate, let’s go back to November of 2013, when the Cubs got me banned from Twitter.
No, seriously, they did. For like three weeks.
I’ve actually been banned twice. The first time was perfectly innocent. I got banned the first time by Twitter itself for posting this picture:
Seriously.
And, surprising, not because it was too hot for Twitter.
I’d gotten Tweeted from an awful spam account by someone who was pretending to be an attractive Asian woman (too old for Adam LaRoche or Blaine Boyer to try to save), and she said something clever like, “Do you want to party?”
I responded with that picture of the Stone Pony and wrote, “No, but he does.”
By quoting her tweet (for maximum hilariousness) I was guilty of forwarding spam. So I got Twitter suspended for two days.
A year later, I’d get it much worse and for a much dumber reason.
I had been trying to get the Cubs to let me do a Twitter Takeover for a while. I’d “politely” ask their official account or to as Kevin Saghy @crediblekev to let me do it. Surprisingly, neither wanted me to do it.
So, on November 15, 2013 I decided to just do it. I changed my Twitter avatar to the Cubs logo, and I changed my screen name, but not my Twitter handle to Cubs Official. And I started Tweeting. I announced that the Cubs had signed Luis Valbuena to a $600 million contract (which they should have), the TV analyst job was open and I announced that Kerry Wood and Rick Sutcliffe had been hired to work with Len Kasper. I answered questions from fans who used the #1908 hashtag. Things were going great.
And then I got suspended. And it stuck, for a long time. Weeks. I had to literally state my case to Twitter’s wardens every day for three weeks before they turned my account back on. Finally, I was back, but those Tweets were lost forever.
Or were they?
Nope. I have them. I had to change my avatar and screenname back to normal, but here they are. In reverse order, from November 15, 2015. The final Tweet before I was banned was about Hank White, but the one that I know got me banned was the one about Wood and Sutcliffe, because lots of people believed it was true, and that the Cubs had announced it. You’ll even see Sahadev Sharma show up in the thread. We laugh about it over baloney sandwiches in the The Athletic lunchroom twice a week.
Just remember, when these posts originally went up there was a Cubs logo for the avatar and it said Cubs Official where it says Desipio.com. So, people had to really pay attention, and most didn’t.
On second thought, maybe it was the Pederast Day tweet?
Nah.
