Tweets Of The Rich And Famous

Peter Kramer/AP

Christopher Walken may not even be the author of his "tweets," but whoever is does a great job.

Curtis Means/NBC NewsWire

MC Hammer's Twitter reveals not the secret to stardom, but what he ate for breakfast.

Christopher Walken is a legend. Few Oscar winners can spur a worldwide trend of "More Cowbell" T-shirts. Fewer still can parlay their ballroom dancing abilities into a YouTube sensation.

But these days, I love Christopher Walken for a whole new reason: He punctuates his "tweets." He capitalizes. Within his 140-character limit, he achieves pithiness and humor. Christopher Walken, or at least the person who poses as him on Twitter, is the level of genius I expect of a ballroom-dancing Oscar winner.

Designed to keep friends and distant acquaintances abreast of everything from your eating habits to the condition of your sinuses, Twitter is like the personalized version of news bytes that scroll across the bottom of a CNN broadcast. But I'm much less interested in the daily activities of people I know than of those I don't (but wish I did): celebrities.

Thanks to Twitter, we can learn a whole bunch of things about our favorite boldface names, forever shattering the "us" and "them" divide that keeps celebrities perched upon their pedestals. What? Ashton Kutcher had a stressful week? MC Hammer ate egg whites, chicken breast, grilled onions, tomatoes, hash browns and wheat toast (and used six exclamation points to tell us about it)? How … normal of them.

But Twitter has had some revealing implications beyond the sudden intimacy with people you don't really know. Things you may not have wanted to know. Like that many of the people I have always admired don't know the difference between "their" and "they're."

For instance, I would have been content to float through life without the burdensome knowledge that my childhood idol, Levar Burton, host of Reading Rainbow, never liked Barney and that he actually named his Kindle "Kunta Kindle." These are not the profound life musings I wanted to hear from the man who kept me company while I choked down Flinstone's vitamins.

Ashton Kutcher can't spell (and carps at Twitter for not having auto-correct), Snoop Dogg is incoherent, and William Shatner concludes each post with "My Best, Bill." Not surprising, but also not up to the philosophical standards I had in mind.

Celebrities are nothing if not image-conscious. Entire fleets of people have made full-time jobs of dressing, primping, preening and generally ensuring that stars don't humiliate themselves in public. Why is the same concern not paid to whether they appear to have completed third grade? Twitter allows common people to access the inner-musings of those who appear larger than life. To find out that Imogen Heap's morning was as banal as my own disrupts my fantasy that being famous means not only being more wealthy and beautiful, but also more insightful and interesting.

If you want to keep the image of your favorite celebrities intact in your mind, don't follow their Twitter. Unless it's Christopher Walken. The man is a genius.

Lauren Evans is an intern at NPR.