By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:02 PM

Can brilliance be achieved in 140 characters or less? Behold the Twitties, an inaugural award honoring the best one-liners from Twitter.com, a Web site where "Twitterers" text or blog the minutiae of their daily lives in super-short "Tweets."

Winners of the contest, sponsored by Philadelphia consulting firm iFractal, will get nothin' but bragging rights. Still, Twitties judges received more than 1,200 nominations, which they pared down to 60 finalists -- five in 12 categories.

Twitter might have first appealed to the "Gossip Girl" demographic ("i'm in chem lab now. lol."), but the two-year-old site now draws a diverse group of subscribers from NASA officials to minor cult celebs.

Voting for the Twitties is open until today at Twitties.com. Here's a look at three of the front-runners -- based on 1,500 votes so far -- and what inspired their Tweets:

Category: Best Breaking News/Journalism/Media Tweet

The Nominated Tweet: "Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, WATER ICE on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!"

The Twitterer: MarsPhoenix, known in real life as Veronica McGregor, the manager of news services for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Tweet Origin: McGregor, a mom of two teenagers, has been Twittering the activities of the Phoenix Mars Lander (from the anthropomorphic perspective of the spacecraft) since it landed in May. MarsPhoenix acquired so many followers that McGregor has also begun Twittering as Mars rovers and a Saturn mission. Deliciously dorky.

Her Chances: Nice use of "w00t," but CNN's entry in this category is brilliant in brevity: "Space station's lone toilet is broken."

Category: Best Tweet (the marquee contest)

The Tweet: "I am totally serious. My Ob/Gyn was IN my vagina, and an earthquake started rattling the room!"

The Twitterer: MissRFTC, known in real life as Verdell Wilson, a communications officer for Warner Bros.

Tweet Origin: Self-explanatory. Routine checkup + mild natural disaster = extremely awkward situation.

After the quakes subsided, Wilson's doc finished the exam, then left so Wilson could get dressed. "That's when I pulled out my cellphone," Wilson says.

That, people, is dedicated Twittering.

Her Chances: Wilson is currently neck and neck with Twitterer Lonelysandwich for best tweet. But Lonely's entry is self-referential pithiness ("Whenever people find out I use something called Twitter, I wish it was called something different, like Ultimate Badass Report"), while Wilson's manages to tell an entire, shocking story.

Bonus points to Wilson for continuing to provide real-time updates. Shortly after the initial Tweet, Wilson posted: "My Ob/Gyn said it was OK if I didn't want to evacuate to the parking lot in my paper gown. I was more concerned about the speculum." Followed by: "Good news, vagina is healthy, albeit shaken up."

Category: Funniest Tweet

The Tweet: "When I was a kid, our footie pajamas weren't flame retardant. DAMN, we were hardcore."

The Twitterer: WilW, known in real life as the actor-turned-author Wil Wheaton. Many of you may recognize him best from his role as Wesley Crusher on "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Tweet Origin: "The cover of my newest book has a picture of me wearing footie pajamas," he says (crafty plug there, Wil). "And I was looking at the cover of the book," when he wrote the Tweet.

FYI, Wheaton is the father of two children, both of whom wear flame-retardant PJs, which makes him especially qualified to comment on the hard-coreness of today's youth.

His Chances: Stellar. True, the "Funniest Tweets" category actually contains some much better entries ("Bozo the Clown has died. Or, for those of us who fear clowns, Bozo the ghost is born"). But Wheaton brings star power to the contest. Read: 16,778 fans who follow his Twitter feed in the hopes of some steamy updates about Trek hottie Deanna Troi.