web-made safety net

For all the stick it gets, I have to say that the internet has made my life quantifiably safer. Rather than putting silly ideas in my head involving fireworks and paint rollers, it satisifies my sense of experimentation by offering up a thousand acts of misjudged lunacy.

Where previously I might have submitted to my own idle curiosity and tried to test the stamina of a CDR in a microwave, or ridden a BMX bike through a flaming piece of trellis, now I can view such activities on-line, and find out just how a) painful, or more often b) anti-climactic the results would have been.

Consider the blender. Those who have them may also like to turn their thoughts to their garbage disposals.

Bill Bryson once wrote of the unfettered glee that he derived from testing the capabilities of a garbage disposal (‘How to have fun at home’), throwing various household goods and assorted items down it until it conked out, spat back or exploded. Notable entries on his list of past subjects included coffee grounds and chopsticks.

Nowadays, we have willitblend.com, which puts most things through a similarly rigorous process of testing. This of course isn’t much fun and experimenting in your own kitchen, but I still don’t bother trying it myself. It sucks the sense of the unknown out of a reckless act when you know someone’s already done and documented it.

So, I am the safer for it. Rather than spur me on to acts of further foolishness, the internet actively pre-empts my own childish curiosity by offering up examples of people doing far more idiotic things than I could ever conceive of.

At least I like to think so. No doubt one day, without even a shred of premeditation, I’ll surprise even myself.

Th’internet giveth and th’internet taketh away. th.

The internet used to be a glorious goldmine of trivia and irrelevance, magnificently random factitude and that.

Upon its arrival and subsequent global acceptance, the whole world was blessed with endless colourful nuggets of knowledge without context or reason, none of which ever made a blind iota of difference to our lives other than offering us peculiar titbits to regale each other with in the pub or place of profession. They were interesting wee bits of brainfood, and nothing else mattered.

But with the rise of Wikipedia and other such malarkey, it’s actually becoming a portal for random fact checking, rather than just random fact-dispensal. It’s depressingly easy to actually check up on the most obtusely perculiar subjects, to dismiss the credibility of one of these joyfully whimsical little footnotes with a simple flutter of keystrokes.

Rather than simply loving the randomness of a fact, or at the very least spending an entertaining but ultimately irrelevant few moments debating the credence of somebody’s new slip of trivia, you can now immediately grind them into the dirt with a casual google and destroy the pleasure of an ultimately harmless particular bit of chatter forever.

Brain coral: sushi for zombies

Of course, it’s always been possible to look things up, but the facts were much more run-of-the-mill and general, and reference sites tended to just offer up the same basic overview of nature and history as the encyclopedia britannica. There was nothing too peculiar, certainly not from a source that you’d actually hold any sway by. The oddest fact you always found was that there was a type of coral living off in the ocean somewhere, shaped like, and named after, the brain.

Now there’s so many more qualified people filling up with world-wide web with informed knowledge about overwhelmingly diverse and unusual topics, and worse, they’re starting to actually reference these little myths and murmurs, expelling them at will.

In some cases, there’s something to be said for the practise: sites like snopes, among other things, do a great job of explaining why you shouldn’t be sending on all those worthless charity chain e-mails to people who you believe still call you a friend. And in most cases, their exposing of myths and falsehoods is so well researched, you can briefly amuse yourself reading the stories of their origins. Likewise, the TV show Mythbusters puts theories to the test in such an entertaining way that you don’t begrudge the loss of the odd snippet in the slightest.

But I think there’s still something to be said for preserving the bits of information that have no bearing on our lives beyond entertainment, even if they are utter poppycock. I mean, who’s being hurt by this apparent misinformation? In coversation last week, myself and a colleague both came out with the notion that polar bears cover their noses with one paw in order to more effectively blend in with their snowy surroundings and so successfully sneak up on their prey.

One sceptic googled it.

From here: ‘One of the most persistent myths about the polar bear is that a hunting bear will cover its black nose while lying in wait for a seal.’

uh oh.

‘ Canadian biologist Ian Stirling has spent several thousand hours watching polar bears hunt. He has never seen one hide its nose, nor have other scientists.’

Boo. Perfectly lovely bit of trivia gone forever.

So I’m suggesting a new rule. If you’re going to write a website, in which you expel some wonderously innocent trivial titbit, you’re going to have to come up with something else to replace it.

So, say you denounce polar bears’ nasal cloaking device, I want you to tell me that Shakespeare invented twister. If Disney’s head ain’t frozen, then you’d better say that everyone in his version of ‘Robin Hood’ was voiced by the same two people. If you prove that Eskimos don’t have sixty-five words for ‘snow’ I want to know that Armadillos were sacred to red indians, and they believed they were a sign to ‘roll with the punches’. Tell me that spiders don’t really crawl into your mouth when you’re asleep and… well, actually I don’t mind that one not being true.

The dead cloud

According to this here article, tag clouds have had their day and are being used less and less. While the author notes that they still have their place, they’ve been abused too many times and left too many sites with a cluttered mess of a sidebar.

Like the author, I’d be sorry to see them go. I’m don’t use them for navigation particularly, but they can be a nice at-a-glance indication of the content of a new blog.

I stuck one on this blog because as a new blogger I didn’t really know what I was going to write about. We’re all aware that a successful blog should have a particular specific theme or topic. And that you need to be able to write openly, honestly and often. So I figured I’d start writing, and see from the tag cloud which subjects I was apparently warming to, and focus more and more on them, allowing my themes to evolve naturally.

It’s early days, but if I made use of my tag cloud in this way, I’d be looking at:

Clouded House

1. Internet. This isn’t helpful, and most blogs stumble into this territory fairly heavily. It’s a web-based medium, and it’s beautifully easy to reference something else going on on the net just by linking to it.

2. Music. I’d rather this was more specific. Music’s an endlessly diverse subject, and the type that you like ain’t necessarily what will float the boat of another.

3. Ageing. Fair enough. But lets not dwell on this.

4. Grumpiness. This is the bit that’s giving me cause for concern. I enjoy wee periods of self-indulgent grumbling from time to time, and a blog allows me a nice medium for venting my grousings, but I don’t really want this to turn into an endless barrage of ranting and vitriol. While some quite wonderful turns of phrase can come from a tirade of hot-headed blusterment, it’s hard to sustain my upset with most things long enough to get home and write about them (88% of all irritances happen outside of the home).

And I am making a conscious effort to be more positive and upbeat. I’m of the opinion that I can’t just submit fully to the inevitable mumbling cantankery of the ageing process when I still enjoy so many simple pleasures.

Putting crisps in sandwiches is one obvious if childish example, or the experience of an album ending just as you finish a journey; the final refrain melting into the ether as you pull up at your destination.

I’ll have to spend some time thinking of more of these. Then I can post them with the accompanying tag of ‘cheerfulness’.

Perry Bible Fellowship

There’s never a bad time to mention the excellent Perry Bible Fellowship, an irregularly but frequently updated comic strip by Nicholas Gurewitch.

The comic strip features no regular characters, no ongoing plot lines and only one or two running gags in countless different and uniquely original episodes. Even the trademark drawing style was discarded a good few strips back in favour of individual styles befitting the varied subjects.

The only common theme was that each story was very, very funny, almost as if you were being presented with material from many different sources by a trusted friend with a great sense of humour, like a treasured comedy mixtape.

Gurewitch has proven himself to be a gifted and dedicated artist. While earlier strips saw him quicly evolve a simplistic but effective drawing style, the innocence of which belied the strips darker content, (often like a silent movie version of redmeat), he later went on to challenge himself with a number of strips that only worked beause of the different illustrative styles that he was able to achieve.

Go take a look now. I’ve linked above to a strip from a little way through, but spend a joyous wee while and start here at the beginning and work your way up through the extensive archives – the evolution of the strip is a wonder.

Gurewitch this year posted a note saying that he has taken a break to ‘pursue other things’. From the quality of each published cartoon, I would say that the collection undoubtedly represents an immense amount of work and that a break is well earned. One day I’d love to see, PreHistory of the Far Side-style, the sketchbooks of his drawings and ideas that didn’t quite get published.