In the Spotlight: Twitter

This week, Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher came to Moscow to talk about Twitter with top Kremlin officials and businessmen. On Thursday, he revealed — on Twitter, of course — that the Russians “want to do biz.”

Pretty-boy actor Kutcher is perhaps better known for being married to Demi Moore than for his television and film work. He is one of the famous people who sacrifice their mystique by typing every half-baked idea they ever have on Twitter — sorry, embrace new technologies to communicate with their fans. To be fair, he probably wouldn’t know how to spell mystique anyway.

Most famously, he once posted a picture of “wifey” Demi Moore bending over in a white bikini, and the couple sometimes communicates via Twitter from different rooms of their mansion.

In preparation for his Moscow trip, he posted an out-of-focus photo of himself in a fur hat and asked for useful phrases. Predictably, someone thought it would be funny to tell him that an entirely unprintable phrase is the way to offer a cheery good morning.

Life News raved over the fact that Kutcher, who arrived Wednesday, didn’t insist on a stretch limo and traveled in a bus with his U.S. colleagues. It also pointed out that he didn’t bother to bring his fur hat after all.

The most enjoyable thing about the visit so far is the po-faced way in which serious publications have covered it. Vedomosti business daily covered the visit with a long article about electronic government and other buzz words, but somehow didn’t get around to mentioning Kutcher, whose oeuvre such as “Dude, Where’s My Car?” probably doesn’t even make its culture pages.

Finally I tracked him down in a long list of the participants, where Vedomosti refers to him as the founder of the DNA Foundation to fight human trafficking, but doesn’t mention his acting.

In more Twitter breaking news, U.S. reality-TV star Tila Tequila has been writing about her plans to adopt a Russian orphan.

She wrote on Feb. 15 that she is about to adopt a boy from an orphanage in Russia, a country that she perceptively describes as “very cold” and “dark.” She has already picked out the authentically Slavic name Jayden for him — although she doesn’t seem too sure of his exact age, calling him two or three — and is decorating his bedroom “with a toy-car bed and blue walls.”

It’s heartwarming stuff, although it’s a little disturbing how she juxtaposes posts about the adoption and her “superduper sexy MILF photo shoot.”

The story has provoked predictable headlines in Russia — “A porn model is adopting a child from Russia,”

Utro.ru wrote, juxtaposing a photograph of Tequila’s cleavage with a crying baby’s face.

Tequila starred in MTV’s show “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,” in which straight men and lesbians competed for a place in her bed. Rather surprisingly, the show used to air dubbed on Russian MTV without a peep of protest, perhaps because it was on after the bedtime of the usual protesters from religious right organizations.

Tequila writes that she has been approved by the adoption agency and that she is going to visit Russia for 21 days to get to know the child.

It’s good to know that Russian officials aren’t prejudiced against unmarried adopters with colorful sex lives, but I suspect that she might run into problems, given the outcry after Elton John and his husband David Furnish last year offered to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian boy called Lev who is infected with HIV. The couple was turned down by officials because they aren’t married under Ukrainian law and because Elton John, 62, is “too old.”