I've known Sean Williams for about a decade. He is a straight-laced corporate communicator from Cleveland. He has worked for Goodyear and National City Bank, and is now starting his own consultancy.

He's a fine writer, he understands communication theory, he believes in measuring outcomes, and somehow he also has a sense of humor.

In short, he's true blue and blue chip.

And this morning, he is a victim—a decidedly innocent victim of a vicious and utterly unfair attack, by none other than PR villain Amanda Chapel.

You'll read Williams' account if you give a rat's ass about Twitter and the dangers of the anonymity the Internet affords would-be character assassins, or wonder how you'd behave if you felt, as Williams told me this morning, "the sense of helplessness" that comes from "sticking your toe into the waters of social media and getting a bite out of your leg."

Friday evening I got the news that my downstairs neighbor in our three-story, seven-unit condo building, was killed in a motorcycle crash.

May 9.

Apropos of the talk this week about Twitter (can you believe these bastards are still in business after the barrage they've gotten here?)*:

Does anybody remember a fleeting term used by the first generation of Internet smart-alecks, around 1995? The "brick world," they called everything except the Internet.

Well, sometimes I surf the Internet looking for the brick world. And other times I surf the brick world looking for the Internet. And I'm here to tell you they're still two different places.

For instance, you can Twitter until you're light blue in the face and you won't find the sort of thing I found the other morning at a suburban restaurant while waiting for my motorcycle to be repaired:

A table of three fat old jagoffs eating breakfast in preparation for a day's work. One complained that he lost $100 in a poker game last night. Another flirted raunchily with the good-natured young waitress. All of them worked the crossword puzzle together, sharpening their minds for the job ahead: picking up a piano in Calumet City and moving it to Elmhurst.

The Internet for climate—the brick world for company!

* Commenting in response to my IABC poem from earlier this week, Boots reader Chuck B. wrote what I believe is the best sentence that has ever appeared on this blog: "Twitter makes me want to be a plumber."