So, Buckley is an expert panelist in Tuesday's "What Would Twain Tweet?" program at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford.
And ... just because he doesn't know anything about Twain doesn't mean Buckley isn't ready to offer an opinion. As his thousands of followers know, opinion offering is the ballast of Buckley's voyaging charm.
"I don't think he'd have a choice but to Twitter," said Buckley, who hosts YouTube's most popular programs from an undisclosed Connecticut location, which thanks to the Internet is somehow always somewhere near you.
On "What the Buck," Buckley offers breakneck-speed commentary on celebrities and everything they're up to. He's had more than 560,000 subscribers since 2006. Recently, he was giving out "Glee" prizes in celebration of the new television show about high school.
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At 34, Buckley is one with his multitasking generation. On a recent morning he was able to nearly simultaneously more than hold up his end of a conversation, repeatedly admonish his extraordinarily active and frequently naughty four little dogs ("Get over it!" he'd yell) and tweet via laptop computer and BlackBerry.
Since at least part of the topic of conversation was Twain, and Buckley didn't seem to know much about him, a nosy reporter suggested that via Twitter he ask his many fans what they knew about the author of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."
Buckley instantly obliged, with the following missive:
"Nosy reporter wants to know what anyone knows about Mark Twain?"
Within seconds, a flood of responses poured forth:
"Real name: Samuel Clemens, most famous book Huckleberry Finn."
"Mark Twain is an idiot,,,,, wait,,,,,who is mark twain again?"
"Mark Twain was in my house yesterday."
" ... did an episode of Star Trek: TNG."
"wacky guy with wackier moustache."
"He was born when Halley's comet appeared and he died when it appeared again 75 yrs later! Pretty cool!"
"Twain would be pretty old if he were still alive today ... that's one thing I know!"
"he's dead, he would have had a killer blog, would have been a twitter maven."
"He slept backwards in bed so he could see the headboard."
"Is he Shania's husband?"
"wrote huck finn silly :)"
"he died in 1910 and had a sexy mustache."
Those are but a few examples.
There was also this response, the nosy reporter's personal favorite:
"Is this reporter some old man who is complaining about new technology and wondering why 'kids never read books anymore'?"
(Answer: Excellent!)
Twain, who did die in 1910, was author of 30 books, some of them classics, as well as short stories and essays. He is also renowned for memorable quotes, some of which would make for good tweets, as in:
"Classic - a book which people praise and don't read."
The Twain museum, the site of the restored Hartford home where the author lived from 1874 to 1891, uses social networking outlets like Facebook and Twitter to reach out to its audience, so the question of how the author would have responded to such newfangled opportunities seemed natural, said Jeffrey L. Nichols, executive director of the museum.
"It came out of a logical process," he said.
Along with Buckley, panelists include Brent Robertson of Fathom, a Hartford advertising agency; Caitlin Thayer, assistant manager of visitor services at the museum; and Greg Wood, president of Boston's Woodhouse Agency, which specializes in social media.
Nichols is inclined to think that Twain would have embraced the new social media. He was, Nichols noted, an early adopter of technology, and was a typesetter as a young apprentice. And because he was paid for output, he was prolific.
"I think he would have adapted his style to the new medium," Nichols said. "Whether he would have is the topic for discussion."
Because the panelists are from the business world, they'll also be able to discuss how new media are affecting business, Nichols said.
"Twitter's changed everything, that's how we get our news," said Buckley. "That's how we find out what's going on in the world."
Buckley's Lhasa apso, George Glass (named for Jan Brady's imaginary boyfriend on "The Brady Bunch"), has 260 followers on Twitter.
Buckley went to Wallingford's Dag Hammarskjold Middle School, Xavier High School in Middletown and then studied psychology at Saint Anselm College, in New Hampshire. He started "What the Buck" for fun, and now it's a phenomenon.
"I'm actually not qualified to talk about Mark Twain," he said.
"I'm really not very scholarly. I remember being in school plays and wanting to watch television - and now that's what I do."
Buckley gets offers, and suggestions that he should move to California, but he says he's not interested in getting closer to celebrities, he just wants to talk about them.
"I like living here," he said. "I just love Connecticut. It's weird."
Wed to his partner in a civil ceremony in Vermont, Buckley says he's so social online that he's much less so in the real world.
Which begs the question of whether Twain, so social in the real world, would have preferred it the other way around.
Tuesday's program at the Mark Twain House & Museum starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15, $10 for members of the museum and holders of the Greater Hartford Arts Council's Let's Go Arts! Card. Tickets and more information are available by calling (860) 280-3154 or (860) 280-3104. The museum is online at www.MarkTwainHouse.org.
Buckley is all over the Web, specifically, at http://buckhollywood.com, http://youtube.com/whatthebuckshow and http://twitter.com/buckhollywood.
jkurz@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2213
