Who is @fruitcartrule?

There are three types of Internet handles that you can have:

1. •

   The Suggested - harjass7654332 (because you missed the boat on being able to get your name and this is what your preferred service provider has randomly generated for uniqueness. Notice, that part of this suggested username contains "ass" which is exactly what I was not going to make of myself by choosing this username)

2. •

   The Name Basis - This is where the cool kids, the early adopters hang out. They were early enough on <choose popular Internet service> and smart enough to grab a unique username for their very common first or last name. In fact, the cool username market is so hot, there's an entire industry devoted to hacking, negotiating, buying and selling of Internet handles. And then there's

3. •

   The Obscure Reference - when you hate The Suggested and weren't fast enough to land The Name Basis, so you resort to the cheap trick of using an obscure reference. But, the great thing about The Obscure Reference is that it's always unique, you can always find it on all platforms because its your reference, and, sometimes it's a great conversation starter!

And this is where @fruitcartrule also comes from. Let's back up to the beginning.

I've been a huge movie nerd for as long as I can remember and the Internet has aided that obsession for years. Particularly, Wikipedia.

As someone who only wanted to invest in watching quality content (read, intellectual snobbery), before watching a movie I'd check out its Wikipedia page and scroll right down to the "Reception" section. And almost any movie that I would check out, there was one name that would pop up over and over again - Roger Ebert.

When I discovered Roger, he had already been reviewing movies for over 40 years and he became a constant voice of reason and trust when it came to film recommendations. More than IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes, I became interested in what Roger had to say about a film.

Years later, in 2012, I got a chance to attend the same university that Roger attended before becoming a professional film critic, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The unique thing about Chambana, as we lovingly called it, was that it was also the home to Ebertfest, a film festival run by Roger Ebert where he would screen movies that he thought deserved more attention and had been largely overlooked by the industry. Ebertfest would be the closest I would come to meeting Roger and telling him how important a role he had played in my life in helping me discover movies. But, the price of admission for the 4 day festival was $150, which, as a college student was a luxury I couldn't afford.

Next year though, after my internship, I told myself.

But Roger passed away the following year on April 4th, 2013 and suddenly there was this gaping hole in me I didn't know how to fill. I had never met Roger, but through his reviews I'd come to know him as much as the movies he reviewed. And there was this sense of regret in me for not having attended Ebertfest the year prior. Now, I wasn't sure if Ebertfest would even continue without him!

But it did. And I put it on my bucket list to attend Ebertfest before I graduated in 2015 and using the money I'd saved from my internship, I bought the $150, 4-day festival pass and found myself among a crowd far more esteemed than I could've imagined. There were people at the festival who had been coming for years and would visit from all corners of the country. There were college sweethearts who had made Ebertfest their annual ritual. There were other contemporaries of Roger's (Michael Phillips, Matt Zoller-Sietz, Brian Tallerico, Richard Roeper) whose reviews I had also followed, and actors (Jason Segel, Chazz Palminteri), directors (James Ponsoldt, Ramin Bahrani, Damián Szifron), writers and producers from movies that were being screened at the festival. And everyone...was...tweeting! In fact, in between movies, if you tweeted @ebertfest, your tweets might show up on the big screen for everyone to see!

But I didn't have a Twitter account. I'd never understood it and so far I'd avoided it but now I wanted to know what everyone thought of the movies we were collectively experiencing. And maybe get my name on that screen too. So given that I was at Ebertfest, and everyone was tweeting, I figured this was my chance to shoot for film critique microblogging stardom! And I turned to Roger for inspiration and found this article on A Glossary of Terms for Cinema of the '80s on his website. And in this article he talks about the "Fruit Cart!" trope from movies in the 80s where:

“Fruit Cart!”: An expletive used by film buffs during any chase scene involving a foreign or ethnic locale, reflecting their certainty that a fruit cart will be overturned during the chase, and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street to shake his face at the departing Porsche.

And I figured, that is hilarious and true and fitting and because I can't find @harjas or @harjassingh on Twitter (see The Name Basis), @fruitcartrule is perfect!

Ebertfest turned out to be a life-altering, reaffirming experience that my love for movies wasn't just a fling but maybe a marriage made in heaven. And even though I didn't get to meet Roger, I did get a chance to meet Chaz, Roger's wife, and let her know how meaningful it was for me to be at Ebertfest that year and that Roger, through his writing, had changed my life.

PS: Neither my name nor my tweets made it to the big screen but @fruitcartrule is now my lasting identity and homage to Roger across the Internet.