At the tender age of 8, a friend of mine that shall remain anonymous invented the portable encyclopedia.
Several years before the personal computer era and two decades before the world wide web era, my school friend discovered that with the aid of a pair of scissors every homework would be a cinch: he’d simply cut out the references from his dad’s leather-bound encyclopedia – text, charts, images and all – and glued them on his homework book.
He never failed to get an “A” for his work. Not sure if his dad ever found out about the missing pages of his precious encyclopedia. Hopefully my school friend is still alive 🙂
Wikipedia is a useful tool not only due to the sheer amount of encyclopedic content it offers for free, but also because of the active references of hypertext linking. One can start searching for something and end up somewhere else within minutes.
While this might be bad when doing research, it definitely doesn’t hurt as a form of “surfing” entertainment.
So tonight, I ended up having a “hangover” after a watching a movie. Here’s what happened, in reverse order:
Oddly, the word “hangover” initially meant “unfinished business”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HangoverI jumped to that entry after reading about the Katzenjammer Kids cartoon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzenjammer_Kids…and the reference to “hangover” and the “katzenjammer kids” was also linked to from Charlie Chaplin’s movie “The Great Dictator”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_DictatorWhich I visited after reading about Jack Oakie, American actor who played Benzino Napaloni (parody of Benito Mussolini) in “The Great Dictator”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_OakieI ended up at Benito Mussolini’s biography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini….having gone through the list of people that made the Time magazine’s cover in the 1920’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_People_on_the_Cover_of_Time_Magazine:_1920s…which I visited after reading about Leo Baekland, inventor of the bakelite plastic, who made Time magazine’s cover:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Baekeland…and ended up there after reading about the wife of Leo Baekland’s grandson, Barbara Daly Baekland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Daly_BaekelandIt all started after I read about the movie “Savage Grace” that I watched tonight:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Grace
By the way, Julianne Moore is stunning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julianne_Moore
