Twitter Whirlwind: Heroes vs Villains

My hazelnut extra cream latte tastes great. Mmmm-mm....

How many of those do we get to read on Twitter?
To say "a lot", would be a major understatement.
A while ago, like many others, I, too, was fascinated with tweets of that and similar kinds. The possibility of letting the world know about my immediate thoughts and current actions looked almost unreal, yet very tempting. And then I noticed something that started bothering me: those tiny tweets were addictive, hence usurped my time, the precious time that I was supposed to spend writing this blog.
I had to put an end to it, which I did having reduced my Twitter activity to one (all right, sometimes two tweets) a month.
Yesterday, however, quite unexpectedly I should say, I got into a fascinating Twitter discussion about operatic heroes and villains, initiated by none other than Erwin Schrott, whose question
What do you think? Is Don G a villain or a hero in disguise? caused a real opinion explosion on Twitter.
 The discussion became fast paced and took abrupt turns, quickly leaping from Don G to Scarpia and, quite shortly, to the comparison of the two "charmers" and their motives. In mere moments, still retaining its fun spirit, it turned from just a lively conversation to an opera whirlwind.
Opera tweeters kept shooting comments in English and Spanish both to Erwin and one another, getting more and more carried away as they received new questions from Erwin, who in his turn commented on each tweet he liked and retweeted them for everyone else to see.
An interesting thing for me was that having tweeted: The true hero in disguise is Leporello. On another thought, maybe not that much of disguise, I received this answer from Erwin:
That's interesting! Never thought of Leporello in "hero" terms.
Wow... How surprising was it to hear this from the singer, whose Leporello actually gave me that thought??!!

An even better moment of the whirlwind was when someone remarked (frankly, without much reason to go that far down the imagination lane) that had Scarpia ever had any luck with Tosca, he would forget her and move on to the next victim quite soon, to which Erwin replied: "Would he keep a catalogo as well?".
This catalogo question inspired me to write:
"Catalogos? Had DG and Scarpia lived in 2012, DG would tweet about his conquests and Scarpia would blog about his."
Apparently much entertained with that comment,  Erwin got inspired to joke about every character of Mozart's opera, imagining who they would become and what they would do in our excessively social-network-ed world of 2012.
My two personal faves were:   "In 2012, Don G would write a blog, and he would be on Facebook too. And Leporello would tweet the catalogue"
and
 "Masetto would be a 'guido' from Jersey Shore".
The bottom line is, this was a great operatic (and mind you, very brain stimulating!) discussion.

The point that I am trying to make here is not that my tweets were liked, retweeted and commented on by an opera superstar. Not at all, even though, of course, it's nice to know that they were.
My point is that Twitter can be great for things other than sharing what pasta you are having for dinner or how much you do not want to get up in the morning.
Not to sound like a snob - those things are important and good for sharing as well.
However, if you are into opera, "follow" the right people and read what they write, every once you might get into a real opera whirlwind!

On this happy note, have a great weekend, everyone, and - may music prevail!