Monday, September 8, 2008

On Wiki-tangents And "Monkey Island"

The beauty of the Internet is that all this information is available to anywhere you have a connection, any time of the day that you need it. The bad part of it is the dilettante aspect where you retrieve just the information you need and only the information that you need, as well as wiki-tangents (Wikipedia + tangents = wiki-tangents).

You know where you study one subject and you click a link to another, and by the end of it, you need to click your Internet history to find out just exactly what it was that you were originally searching for? Yeah, that writing black hole. As an example, I have a good story all written up and the only problem with it is that it doesn't have a middle. It literally has a few sentence fragments and nothing more. So I have to fill those sentences in, while staying clear of the borders of Anachronism Land.

The first wiki-tangent yielded actual useful information, though I wasted a good amount of time because a video of the shell that was Bonnie and Clyde's death car, wouldn't load for shit with my dial-up. Ehi, I had to surrender. The second thing that amazed me was when I was researching orange groves in the San Fernando Valley and I found out about a place back in the day called "Monkey Island." Try to put something up that abysmal today and the PETA people will hound you to the ends of the Earth...where they will torture by feeding you a tofu effigy of yourself and singing really crappy folk songs off-key.

If you click the link, please scroll up and down. You'll find other quotes about the San Fernando Valley by Michael Connelly, Raymond Chandler, Robert Redford, and many others. Now, if only I can figure just what exactly is my fascination with Mulholland Drive, despite never having drove or set foot on it, then I can get some sleep.

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