There are days where my brain reacts to almost any subject like a thesaurus rather than a dictionary or encyclopedia. It takes the subject and says “okay, that links to this and that, and those two link to these four,” and so on and so forth. It is a psychological test, really.
“What does _____ make you think of first?” and what comes out could be anything. It takes something ’special’ to go from slide rules to Pete Rose’s penchant for sliding into bases head-first instead of feet-first, and then to wonder if there really is any scientific reasoning behind it (I doubt it, after all – it was Pete Rose) and then from Pete Rose the conversation might turn to gambling, specifically sports gambling, and then to any number of things – poker faces, the art of the bluff, and whether or not lying can be considered ethically sound depending on the situation.
All because someone mentioned slide rules – and nobody cared enough to actually talk about them. This is how most conversations go, I think, even if you actually do have a lengthy conversation about the original subject it eventually jumps to something tangential, possibly related (but it does not have to be) and then you hop and skip all over the place.
Personally, I blame Wikipedia, but the ‘problem’ was around long before that. Wikipedia (or any wiki, really) can just eat up my day if I am not careful. Clicking from this to that to whatever. You, for whatever reason, want to read about the Gummi Bears cartoon, then see that one of the voice actors also voiced some people from Winnie The Pooh, so you jump there, then you are reading about A.A. Milne and how much his son hates to be named “Christopher Robin” because of what his father wrote – and that jumps to Kenny Loggins thanks to his writing the song “Back To Pooh Corner” and then we end up at Top Gun or Caddyshack and then to Tom Cruise or Bill Murray or Chevy Chase and then to Saturday Night Live or Katie Holmes and Scientology and then Issac Hayes and South Park and so on and so on and so on. That could be three hours or pure ‘who really needs to know any of this?’ entertainment.
For the record, I am only making assumptions about most of those jumps, having not made that particular click-to-click trip, but if the internet is anything besides a gateway to pornography, it is a place where you can start looking up information about Gummi Bears and end up possibly changing your religion.
I like the red ones.
Peace,
James.
