Dear Interwebs

[bruorton]

Dear Interwebs,

I have always held a small grudge against you for depriving me, by your conquest of bookstores and library catalogs, of much of the joy and serendipity of browsing through shelves, and unexpected discoveries this has brought into my life.

I am moved to confess this chiefly because I have noticed of late that you have now become a sort of expansive library yourself, full of the profound and trivial and organized by as many different systems as you have contributors.  Now, any foray away from my routine path of email, news, and blog aggregates feels as chaotic a jaunt as I could ever have had filling my arms with books pulled at random from the shelves of a quality used bookstore.

In a single day, for instance, my regular news addiction can bring me video of an artist's rendering of viral replication and the immune response; a quick detour through Paul Krugman's blog will remind me to go read up on this year's Ig Nobel Awards; and following a trail of hyperlinks educating me on Rick Warren's misogyny might lead me to the funniest music video I have ever seen (whose topic is almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to Rick Warren).

So all in all, Tubes, I forgive you.

Bruorton

Comments

[kaph.livejournal.com]

"Peanutty things" and "noodly things" being the scientific terms, of course. :)

I loved that music video - ESPECIALLY the men's chorus.

And "A Series of Tubes" is always a good time. This is the third time I've watched it and I still almost peed my pants.

But the penultimate link - where was Rick Warren in that??

[bruorton.livejournal.com]

Oh, it wasn't supposed to be about Rick Warren (or I would have made him the hyperlink text). It was just to give the derivation of that phrase -- a citation, if you will -- and it was an excuse for a Douglas Adams link to boot.