Wiki-walking

Wiki-walking: my term for the countless hours lost hyperlinking your way through Wikipedia when, initially, the intent was to read only one entry . It is completely possible someone else has coined this term.

Here is a good wiki-walk I took this morning:

Moby Dick-->greatest novels (Western Canon)-->Great Books of the Western World-->The Great Converstion-->Moby Dick-->Romanticism-->Transcendentalist-->Romanticsm-->The Sorrows of Young Werther-->Sturm und Drang-->Prometheus (unfinished Goethe poem)--Prometheus-->Prometheus Society-->Mensa International . . . terminated.

I learned that Sturm und Drang loosely translates to Storm and Stress . . . which I kind of think would be a cool band name, or a blog name. So would Mental Furniture. Odd band names would be a good topic for another post.

All of this started because I was reading The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell, which so far is exceedingly average and overwrought with commas (which I am particularly sensitive to because I struggle with this same prediliction, and I kind of hate it) . . . but in one scene he compares his pursuit of a pig to Ahab's pursuit of the whale. I got to thinking about Moby Dick and zoned out for half a page before looking it up.

Could the tools and systems of information and convenience have such a warping effect on our minds so as to cause something like ADD, or does it just seem that way? The links vying for my attention on that site are little data-sirens. I do this a lot.

Itinerant's Law #33

Itinerant's Law #33: You are likely to be the only "expert" in the airport's Expert Traveler security line.

Provenance: Any airport where they give a person the ability to
qualify themselves as an expert in anything.

Example: The "expert" in front of me had to go through the metal
detector 3 separate times to remove from his pockets, in order: a lighter (TSA alert?), 4 individual serving Advil packets, and finally about $2.73 in loose change.