One of my favorite Twitter feeds is Ned Rolsma’s @imsevenfeet, which is filled with tweets about people’s reactions to his height (and, often, his responses). Some recent ones:

“Excuse me! HEY! Do u play basketball?” – 2 ladies behind me in #UnionStation. “HELLLOOOO!” Blew em off, didn’t wanna assume they meant me.

“Hey, if we need to get anything up high we can just grab him!” – guy in Toys r Us, to lady at other end of aisle. #BlackFriday

Ned — an actor who got his broadcast journalism degree from the University of Tennessee a decade ago — tells me he came up with the idea of tweeting reactions to his height about three years ago.

I was going through a stretch where I carried a bit of a bad attitude about the barrage of “HTRU?”s & other height related remarks that follow me anytime I walk out the front door.

Halloween 2011

I became overly self-conscious and took the constant attention and scrutiny very personally; generally feeling picked on, mocked, and made fun of. A good friend of mine suggested I do something fun and creative with it; make a game of it, as sort of a therapeutic way to disengage from taking it all too seriously and to share with people the litany of comments and reactions I get that run the gamut from warm, genuine, and kind, to hilarious and off-the-wall, to rude, ignorant, and thoughtless.

He says “people of all varieties and walks-of-life” bring up his height. “Boy, if I had a nickel for every ‘It’s good to be tall!’ I hear, and I find that fascinating,” he tells me in email. “It’s something I want to get to the bottom of and maybe shine a light in there, help people get past it and the other apparent ‘differences’ we have between us, and shift the focus back to that which makes us all exactly the same.” Read More

A lawyer for Sheboygan, Wis. Mayor Bob Ryan contends that 18-year-old Asher Heimermann’s @MayorBobRyan Twitter feed “rises to the level of identity theft” and warns that “if the conduct does not immediately cease, we will take appropriate action.”

The bio section of the feed originally stated, “I’m Sheboygan’s embattled mayor,” but Heimermann changed it to made it clear it was a parody site minutes after Sheboygan Press reporter Eric Litke called him this week for comment.

Asher Heimermann

The teen, who is running for Sheboygan mayor, tells the local newspaper:

It appears Mayor Ryan is more concerned about a parody Twitter account and a domain name then operating the City of Sheboygan. … He is worried (about) me challenging him in the upcoming recall election. He knows that he has a real possibility of losing his job.

Heimermann says he’s going to ignore the cease and desist notice. So what’s the embattled mayor’s next move?

“I’ll have to discuss with my client which options he wishes to pursue,” says his lawyer. “We were hoping the young man had a little bit of maturity to stop his identity theft of Bob Ryan and that he had the maturity and responsibility to restore the website to Bob Ryan that he in effect stole from him.”

The mayor, who is an alcoholic, made headlines after he was seen drinking one day last summer from mid-afternoon until closing time while being obnoxious toward women. He was also spotted getting into his car after drinking.

Reporter Litke, who has been covering the ongoing Ryan-Heimermann feud, tells me few very people pay attention to the parody feed, and “it’s one of those issues that would have faded into Internet oblivion” if the mayor hadn’t taken it so seriously and made it an issue.

* Teen mayoral candidate to ignore cease and desist letter (Sheboygan Press)