Greetings from Charlotte. Wait, Charlotte? What’s he doing in North Carolina? I’m suffering in airline hell, that’s what!

I left Charlottesville, Virginia, this morning. I was supposed to board a 10:20 United flight to Dulles. But that plane was already behind schedule, leaving me no time to make my connection. The airline courteously booked me on an on-time U.S. Airways flight to Charlotte, where I could get a connecting flight to Newark. Fine.

Actually, not fine. In Charlotte, my plane left on time and taxied out. It sat on the tarmac for two and a half hours. Then it taxied back. Now I’m part of a planeload of passengers waiting in the terminal while the airline negotiates with air traffic control for permission to land its plane in Newark. The latest word is that we’re supposed to take off at 5:30 – four hours late. The official explanation for the delay? “Weather.” Except it’s an absolutely beautiful day all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, and the departure boards show most of the other flights are on time.

If I’d left my hotel this morning and kept driving to Brooklyn, instead of to the airport, I’d be there by now. Now I am further away from home than when I started.

Also of interest: At no point today has anyone asked to see my identification.

Update: The plane landed in Newark more than four hours late. The pilot explained that landings were slow-going into Newark due to “puffy clouds.” My suitcase followed about 20 minutes later, arriving on a different plane.

I may be wrong about Twitter, but I’m pretty sure it’s over. We’ve given it long enough. We’ve been patient. It’s not poised to break out of the nerd community. It’s not the next big thing.

Why is Twitter doomed to be a niche player? It takes too much work to sort through all the noise. Twitter represents the purest form of Web 2.0’s biggest problem: A crowd of people unsure what they want to hear matched with a crowd of people with nothing interesting to say. As a communications tool, it offers very little that the average person can’t get from a blog or Facebook or MySpace.

When Twitter was new, I started an account for lurking purposes. Work-wise, it has been of no help to my reporting. The sources I care most about – the ones who are well-informed about my beat, which is professional photography – are not on Twitter. They don’t know about Twitter. They are too busy. If you explained Twitter to them (”You post just a sentence or two at a time, even a text from your cell phone, telling people what you’re doing all day long”) they would think you were a loser. And they’d be right.

Apart from work, I don’t have any urge to share a minute-by-minute account of my life. When I have something that deserves a mention, I put it here on this blog (via text message if appropriate).

Even though I have never posted anything to my Twitter account, nor told anyone about it until now, 18 people have signed up to follow me. I don’t know who most of them are. I think a few of them are spammers. If you’re one of them, let the record note that I actually do a lot of things. I’m just not one to Twitter about it.

Counterpoint: Charles Cooper: For some reason, Twitter hasn’t yet taken the journalist community by storm.

Update: I had this post cued up in advance and failed to notice my friend Bret was blogging about the same thing. He’s in the Twitter camp. Like I said, I could be wrong about this one.

Amy Winehouse did it for Harry Benson in the New Yorker. Josh Brolin did it for the January cover of GQ. Ryan Reynolds did it in “Definitely, Maybe.”

I’m talking about smoking, in all its glowing sexiness. This hazy cloud shows no sign of dissipating from popular entertainment.

I have a simple relationship with smoking. I don’t smoke because I have a low opinion of cancer. The few times I have smoked cigarettes, I enjoyed them. But I realized that I’m the sort of person who looks kind of dippy holding a cigarette. (The point of your 20s, I think, is to identify the behaviors that make you look or feel ridiculous, and gradually expunge them from your life.)

Moreover, tobacco companies have such a long and well-known history of evildoing that no one with any scruples would work for one today. Therefore, all tobacco company employees are unscrupulous.

Which brings us to celebrity smokers. A voluntary ban on tobacco advertising in magazines took effect last year (Oh, you didn’t know that?). You can’t air cigarette ads on TV or put them on billboards or even name a NASCAR race after them. Tobacco ads are over! – cultural waste to be recycled and mocked by Richard Prince and “Mad Men.”

Backed into a corner, tobacco companies are known to resort to desperate measures. Secret product placements in magazines and films and TV shows – ones that everyone, if asked, can *cough cough* plausibly deny – seem so rational that it’s hard to believe they aren’t happening.

Feel like diagramming a sentence? Try the lead to The New York Times’s William F. Buckley obit:

“William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.”

Prewritten obits sound a lot stronger when you read them in the back of the newspaper (toward the bottom of a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning), rather than on the front of a breaking news Web site. I need to know how the fellow died, please hold the polysyllabic exuberance.

Roy “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” Scheider has died.

Those of us too young to get why Jaws was a big deal remember Scheider as the captain of the SeaQuest. He’s the man I’d want in charge of my massive, teardrop-shaped, torpedo-armed, research submarine.