When you “follow” the account of a famous person on social media, it’s always gratifying when they “follow” your account back. I suppose it’s even better when some famous person follows your account out of the blue, but that’s never happened to me.
So, here’s your chance to shamelessly name-drop! Which famous people follow you, or have accepted your friend request, on social media? Don’t list anyone whom you first met or corresponded with outside of social media—this isn’t meant to be a thread of just “famous people you know”.
Here’s my own modest list, which admittedly may depend on relatively low values of “famous”:
Jean Teillet (indigenous rights lawyer and grand-niece of Louis Riel; has been in the Canadian news a lot lately)
Phoef Sutton (comedy writer; wrote many of the best episodes of Cheers)
Rogers Cadenhead (tech author and humorist; wrote lots of programming books and ran the websites Cruel Site of the Day and Drudge Retort)
Mark Saltveit (stand-up comedian, word-champion palindromist)
An honorary mention goes to Shiva Ayyadurai, self-proclaimed inventor of e-mail (not!), who briefly followed me after failing to spot the obvious sarcasm in an excessively laudatory tweet I posted about him.
There may be one or two more but I honestly can’t remember if our first contact was on social media or elsewhere…
Hmmm, back when I was still working and I had what I would call my “burner account” and tweeted quite a lot, a bunch of movie critics followed me, the actor Jeffrey Wright, the author Steve Silberman, an indie director whose name I can’t remember, and an indie musician.
With the new, more sedate account, just one of those movie critics plus that same indie musician still follow me, and I think that’s it?
I just went and looked. Make that two indie musicians, and a pretty well-known YA author who I went to school with, plus four other authors of niche books.
The closest to famous I have is Facebook friend Michael/Mike Farmer, world-traveling meteorite hunter that has been in the news many times, spent time locked up in Oman, had an auction at Christie’s, and has been compared to Indiana Jones by Steven Spielberg himself. And who can appreciate the humor that the one time he went truly viral is when he recently found a shiny bug.
I am friends with Iain Baker of Jesus Jones on facebook. We were previously connected through a small social network that was purchased by FB, and later shut down.
Mostly I don’t think about him in relation to the band - only when he posts about tours or the like, which, except when those are happening, is rare.
I was an early adopter of Twitter. I initially joined it to follow Stephen Fry. He was the first person I followed on Twitter, and also my first Twitter follower.
A notorious antivax doc, Sherri Tenpenny follows me on Twitter.* She testified to Ohio legislators about Covid vaccines magnetizing people.
“I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized,” Tenpenny, of Middleburg Heights in Cuyahoga County, said. “You can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that.”
Over on Twitter (Up yours, Musk!) I am followed by a number of unknown activists, but also by John Curtas (the premier food critic in Las Vegas) and Juliet Landau (Drusilla on BtVS).
My high school band director, who is almost certainly the most well known living resident of my hometown of Kingsville (AFAIK no actual polls have been done) and also known by most of the people in the music industry in the Corpus Christi area.
