Fab actress Holland Taylor folos my tweets; will you?

Actress Holland Taylor’s Twitter account indicates she doesn’t follow Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates or Pope Benedict.

She doesn’t follow Tim Tebow, Maya Angelou, Angela Merkel or the Rev. Harold Camping, the whack job pastor who said God told him he was going to end the world last May (favorite headline from that non-event: “Apocalypse Not Now!”).

Taylor, the ever-sexy and sassy co-star of hit shows from “Bosum Buddies” to “Two and a Half Men,” follows just 190 Earthlings including Stephen Colbert, Tom Hanks, Michele Obama, Frank Rich ...

And me.

Where this places me on the spectrum of cool is difficult for me to calculate.

But it will give me momentary bragging rights at The Pond, the friendly tavern beneath my Latrobe, Pa., office, after I explain what Twitter is, why any of them should care, and that Holland Taylor’s chummy with Tom Hanks and Charlie Sheen.

Last week I was surprised to find I was the recipient of a conspiracy of people who are trying to do what I’ve been unable for two years to do on my own: raise my Twitter profile. The ball, I guess got rolling, by @EditorialHell, a publisher who’s described himself as my biggest fan. Thank you, my friend!

He’s been advising friends to read my stories and achieved success with someone I’d never met who tweets as @TheDowagerSays. She wrote:

“Very few undiscovered gems left, but the writer Mr. Rodell (@8Days2Amish) is one of them. He’s odd, but he’s hilarious. And he can write.”

Sometimes -- and I’m not proud of this -- I will alter quotes about me to make them sound even more smashing. Or at least palatable.

They do this for all the Adam Sandler movies. For instance, a review that reads: “Adam Sandler is a perfect example of why so many lousy movies earn just one star,” will be transformed for promotional purposes to read: “Adam Sandler is a perfect movie star!”

But that lovely quote about me is genuine.

This enigmatic Dowager’s profile says she resides in North Yorkshire, England, and is dedicated to preserving “the moral and social structure of civilization.”

If you added “ . . . and being done doing so in time for my first beer by 4:30 p.m.” then that goal could be mine, too!

What caught my attention after a rush of new followers is that The One True Dowager is enjoyed by 7,469 followers, yet follows just eight herself. That’s uncommonly picky.

And I’m one of the eight.

Those numbers are stacked enough to penetrate even my dense understanding of basic mathematics: This Dowager is culturally influential.

So it was a fun evening watching a rush of new followers take the Dowager’s advice and follow me. It was a great surprise to see Holland, an actress I’ve always admired, do so, too. She’s just perfectly cool and so I was thrilled when the day after she began following me, she retweeted to her 14,278 followers the following tweet of mine:

“I understand if I pray for riches I’ll get nothing and if I pray for wisdom I’ll need nothing, but I can’t help it. I still pray for riches.”

I remain unsure of what twitter success will mean to my career, but if someone from a company that hires writers to compose fortune cookie notes says they want me after reading my tweets then that’ll be a significant boost.

So I’d like to extend this invitation to Holland Taylor, The One True Dowager and @Editorial Hell to come and enjoy dinner at our house on Saturday. The Westmoreland County Airshow is this weekend and you can enjoy the Blue Angels performing from the splendor of our back porch.

And to prove I remain egalitarian in my gratitude I’m extending the same offer to each and everyone who’s taken the time to follow @8days2amish.

All 172 of you!

I’d advise some of you to car pool. Parking promises to be a bit tight.

If you’re unfamiliar with twitter, here is my monthly @8days2amish round-up of what I think were some of my dozen best tweets:

• Devoted stationary salesmen are always pushing the envelope.

• It's indicative of innate verbosity attorneys feel obliged to include "at law" in titles. Nothing about them suggests "attorneys at play."

• I believe another consequence of global warming is that soon delightful little lightning bugs will begin to shoot actual lightning.

• Jim Crow racists used to call minorities who acted confident, "uppity." Did they call the ones who bent to their oppressions, "downity?"

• Has anyone ever researched if the CAPS key on e.e. cummings's typewriter was busted? That might explain a lot.

• So Trayvon Martin had pot in his system when gunned down. Maybe if George Zimmerman had some in his we never would have heard of either of them

• Forecasters predict warmest Mem Day Wknd ever. Don't believe 'em. Don't believe scientists, stats or your drippin' sweat. Believe Sean Hannity.

• His sense of irony intact, Donald Rumsfeld tells CBS he was "uncomfortable" with how Obama dealt with Khadafi and Libya.

• Told 5-year-old if you squeeze a piece of coal hard enough she’ll make a diamond. She squeezed so hard she almost made a turd.

• The very best bald-faced liars lack eyebrows.

• Honesty without tact is like brain surgery without anesthesia. The operation could cure, but the complications can kill.

• Redundant headlines say "Wildfires out of control." Of course they are. There's a reason they not called "tamefires."

• I'm such a reflexive pacifist the only thing I instinctively kill is time.

• Someday when I see a big "Welcome!" sign on someone's door I'm going to test owner truthfulness by marching in & making myself right at home

• Parenting advice from Elton John I consider sound enough to practice: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.

Awaiting Pat Robertson's take on the 'quake

I’ve spent the past two days praying for Japanese earthquake victims and looking forward to Pat Robertson’s explanation as to why the poor bastards really had it coming.

For more than 50 years, he’s been a sort of a sin meteorologist. He foretells where the sin storms are most severe and the consequences of living a life that doesn’t involve contributing far right Christian for-profit enterprises like his.

He’s not like the rest of us who react to catastrophe with instinctual humanity. We pray, send money and we feel compassionate pity for the victims of indiscriminate and so-called “acts of God.”

Not Robertson.

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,836, Robertson took to the airwaves to pronounce the storm as God’s response to America’s abortion policies.

He said the 2010 Haiti earthquake was the result of an historic “pact with the Devil” Haitian founders made that left the island cursed.

Speaking of cursed, I’d like to hear what Robertson says about the Pittsburgh Pirates, now embarking on 19 seasons without a winning record.

Then there are what should be called “acts of Pat.” These are things God specifically tells him are bound to happen that haven’t.

You sinners may have been too hungover to have heard it, but Robertson on  January 1, 2009, said, “If I’m hearing God right then gold will go to about $1,900 an ounce oil to $300 a barrel. But economically things are going to start turning around.”

Wow. Talk about covering all your bases. He was off on the price of gold by $500 an ounce and overshot oil by $170, but things did start slowly turning around.

And on January 2, 2007 -- and I really have to start tuning into the 700 Club right after Dick Clark signs off -- he said America was going to suffer “mass killings” in the next 12 months.

“The Lord didn’t say nuclear, but I do believe it will be something like that,” he said.

When observant reporters were doing year-end wrap up stories and saw no front page mushroom clouds, they called him on it.

“All I can think is that somehow the people of God prayed and God in his mercy spared us.”

Cue Maxwell Smart: “Missed it by THAT much.”

Sometimes Robertson, 80, seems to have more in common with Hollywood’s Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of “Armageddon” and other disaster films, than with the humble Baptist preacher he claims to be.

He said God told him in January 2006, “If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms. There may well be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.” He repeated the tsunami claim four times throughout the year.

The tides that year were more in tune with what you’d find in the Old Farmer’s Almanac than the Old Testament.

My favorite was he in 1976 predicted to much hoopla that the world would end in 1982 (the Pirates last won the World Series in 1979, so Pittsburgh appreciated the grace period).

He really hammered the doomsday prediction home, too, saying in a May 1980 “700 Club” broadcast, “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be judgement on the world.”

Missed it by THAT much.

(Reminder: Christian broadcaster Harold Camping, the 89-year-old leader of the Oakland, California, based Family Radio Network, has issued his own scholarly update: world ending May 21. I haven’t paid cash for anything since the announcement three months ago).

I haven’t heard what Robertson’s had to say with the competing doomsday prediction.

You’d have to think, him being in the doomsday prediction business, Robertson secretly hopes something horrific will happen to people he judges as so morally inferior just so he could enjoy one of the world’s best “I told you so’s.”

Sure, it would mean the deaths of thousands of innocents, but it would prove he’s right -- as if anyone familiar with Robertson’s Christian Coalition needed further proof he’s really right.

It's only natural. We all want to be our predictions to come true. We all want to say “I told you so.”

I mean, we’re all only human, right?

Hmmm . . .

I may have discovered the root of the problem with Pat.

Devout Christians departing May 21: Yippee!

Looks like anyone who purchased for full price a 2011 calendar paid twice too much. A group of Christians is making news for pinpointing the exact end of days.

Mark your calendars. It’s May 21.

The precision of the date was determined by Christian broadcaster Harold Camping, the 89-year-old leader of the Oakland, California, based Family Radio Network.

His calculations are based on thorough Biblical readings and external factors such as the 1948 founding of Israel.

And you had to figure the Jews would have something to do with it.

“Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgement,” Camping says.

If Camping is correct then, according to Rapture believers, all the most devout Christians will be magically whisked to heaven while the rest of us face times of deadly upheaval.

Well, good riddance.

Tea Party morons will have lost their greatest constituency, the “God Hates Fags!" crowd won’t be around to torment soldiers’ funerals, and Rush Limbaugh will have so few listeners he’ll be relegated to a static-filled backwater AM channels.

Yes, Rush’s listeners may be going to heaven, but he’s not going anywhere.

I’d love to see how the rest of us could do on solving problems like the spread of AIDS and global warming without having meddling Christians around to tell us things like condoms and compact fluorescent light bulbs are the devil’s playthings.

We could enact some common sense gun laws, build temples devoted to ecumenical peace near Ground Zero and -- who knows? -- maybe even persuade Simon Cowell to return and save “American Idol.”

For me, hating Christians is an act of self-loathing because I’ve always considered myself one.

Yes, I think I’m one of the baptized good guys. I kneel down and pray to God and Jesus every night. I do unto others as I’d have them do unto me. It’s my faith and I revere essential Christian tenets of love and forgiveness. 

But guys like me don’t make the true Christian cut because we entertain the cosmic possibility that just maybe we’re wrong.

We can believe, but we cannot know.

That’s why three of my favorite musings on the subject of religion are firmly secular thoughts from a trio of monumental men.

The first is from Thomas Jefferson who said, “Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there is one, He must more approve of the homage to reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

Then there’s this from Henry David Thoreau who on his deathbed was asked if he’d made his peace with the Lord. Thoreau’s sublime response: “We’ve never quarreled.”

The third is from my late grandfather who shortly before his death at 98 said he was hoping he’d get to meet God to ask him, “Now, I know you created heaven and earth, but who or what created you?”

A heaven with the Christians who say they can divine things like when God plans to flip the big “off” switch is a heaven I do not wish to attend.

All the people will have the same boring haircuts. They’ll say the same sanctimonious things. They’ll be Dallas Cowboy fans. They’ll still find reasons to think they’re superior to other less pale Christians.

I’ve been to parties like that and they seemed to last an eternity.

I cannot begin to fathom how long an actual eternity like that would seem.

So, go ahead, you true believers, and rise up to your exclusionary stick-up-the-ass heaven, the one that will make lilly white places like Augusta National seem diverse and hip.

I’m staying here with my friends, the ones who like to drink, smoke, swear and screw.

Sure, if Camping and his followers are correct we may be in for some historically tough times.

But we’ll give it hell.

And in many ways, that will seem like a heavenly alternative to what the most devout Christians have always had to offer.