One month ago yesterday, a 28-year-old Justin Halpern launched a Twitter page wherein he tweets out quotes from his 73-year-old father Sam. See, some time earlier Justin had moved back into his folks’ house in San Diego. Initially, he quoted his dad in the status line of his instant messaging account. Later a friend suggested he use Twitter. On August 3rd, Justin launched the feed with this missive from Sam.

“I didn’t live to be 73 years old so I could eat kale. Don’t fix me your breakfast and pretend you’re fixing mine.”

Sam is a preternaturally quotable old cuss, whose penchant for colorful language didn’t take long to become the signature feature of most of the daily updates. By mid-month Sam had hit his stride.

“My flight lands at 9:30 on Sunday…You want to watch what? What the fuck is mad men? I’m a mad man if you don’t pick me the hell up.”

With material like this, the number of followers exploded. Approaching 250,000 now, this page now has a follower total more than three times that of two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash and two-thirds of the way to Tina Fey. With hundreds of people adding SMDS every hour, the stream has now attracted the attention of the publishing media. According to the LA Times, Justin has signed with an agent and is considering offers from publishers. Sure, he was already a writer for Maxim. But it’s only been 31 days.  Twenty-nine tweets. This has to be the craziest ratio of writerly output to popular and industry response in history. Justin’s not even within shouting distance of 1,000 words yet, but a quarter million people appear to be hanging on damn near every one of them.

And therein lies the lesson. As anyone who’s ever tried to grab your attention with 14 words on a banner ad can attest, sometimes a highly condensed story can have much of the character, nuance, and narrative arc of its bigger brethren. Creating the right mechanism of delivery is tricky. But Justin and his dad sure cram a lot of story into those 140 characters. And it seems to resonate more than a little bit. With all of those people tuning in to read what Justin’s dad has to say, those little stories–that are all part of a bigger story–are starting to develop some muscle. Sometimes the old man even talks about products. Mrs. Dash: thumbs up. Maker’s Mark. Aye. Jim Beam, Kate Beckinsale, not so lucky. At this rate Sam will have a Super Bowl spot by January. Well, maybe I’m getting ahead of the story. But, at least a free case of Mrs. Dash should be already on its way.

Daniel Turman

PS. Hat tip to Craig Ritchie for breaking this news for me. On Twitter, of course.