Copious Notes

My Twitter home page. Look for me @copiousnotes.

The video service Hulu, we are told in its advertising campaign, is “an evil plot to destroy the world.”

That might be — he says, having been sucked into hours of watching ­reruns of Saturday Night Live and WKRP in Cincinnati.

But to listen to some people, you’d think Twitter was the one pulling the planet apart, 140 characters at a time.

David Letterman was at least ­honest in his dressing-down of ­Twitter on his April 24 show: “When you don’t ­understand anything, and you’re ­frightened by things, then you make fun of it, you ridicule it, and that’s what I’m doing. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it.”

Funny — and funnier if you saw Dave deliver it in his cranky-old-man fashion.

It’s more annoying when you hear clueless comments. For instance, on NPR’s Weekend Edition on April 26, This I Believe co-producer Jay ­Allison compared his series of essays about faith to several Internet upstarts: “I think that separates it from Twitter and blogging and Facebook. It’s not a chronicle of what’s happening in that moment. It’s something that’s gathered over the course of an entire life.”

Yes, but neither I nor ­anyone else I know of has ever equated jotting a quick note with writing a memoir.

Lumping Twitter with an essay, or even ­blogging and Facebook, shows a ­fundamental lack of ­understanding of what ­Twitter is — and of the ­curiosity to find out.

(By the way, NPR has a Twitter account, churning out headlines on a regular basis.)

It’s not that hard to learn what Twitter is. As Internet applications go, it is one of the easiest out there.

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Allyson Smith as Ma and Zach Moseley as Tom Joad in the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community and Technical College theater programs' production of "The Grapes of Wrath." Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Friday morning, NPR’s Morning Edition featured a report about how migrant workers in the United States who had moved up from working in the fields to coveted construction jobs are now having to head back to agricultural work because the building boom has gone bust.

The report ended saying, “But for now, older so-called domestic farm workers and former construction workers will take the jobs — unless things get so bad that U.S. citizens are willing to move across the country for five months’ work in these lettuce fields at $350 a week.”

Friday night, I settled into a seat at the Guignol Theatre to watch a play about U.S. citizens willingly traveling across the country to work the fields for much, much less.

This week, the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community and Technical College theater programs opened a joint production of the Depression epic The Grapes of Wrath, which runs through March 1, and no one can accuse them of presenting escapist entertainment.

The Grapes of Wrath is tough to watch or read at any time. A big part of the story’s greatness is how John Steinbeck chronicled some of the worst elements of the Great Depression in aching detail: a family of 12 traveling cross country in an barely road-worthy truck, losing people along the way to death and despair. In the promised land of California, they find thousands more like themselves all at the mercy of bully farm owners and policemen.

You think, “There but for the grace . . . ” and then remember that for the past several months the unemployment rolls have grown in the high-hundreds of thousands monthly, the stock market keeps finding new lows and we keep hearing we’re in the worst economic crisis since — ugh — the Great Depression.

UK and BCTC of course did not plan to be this timely. They aimed to stage an ambitious production with a cast of more than two dozen, some impressive set pieces, and cool video elements. And they planned it when $4 gas was draining our wallets, but we were still months away from the banking collapses of the fall.

Now, Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of Grapes is almost too timely as a vivid portrait of a time we keep hearing about when we turn on the news.

Maybe we need to see this. But maybe what we need most are these words from Ma (played by Allyson Smith), late in the second act: “Don’t you go frettin’. A different time’s coming.”