Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Tangents and Wikipedia

I often bring up the term “conversational tangents.” Picture this: A friend and I are having a conversation over a spliff or whatever, we’re on the porch, because we’re porch monkeys (I decided this term isn’t racist, we call ourselves porch monkeys because we hang out on the porch a lot). We’ll be on the topic of high school, remembering stories and how much cocaine I sold to people and guaranteed good grades until graduation. Then we’ll start talking about school buses and about the time that my friend Jade threw Stephen Carter’s left shoe out the window on the highway. Then we’ll start talking about the color of the school buses and who decided to make school buses such an unattractive color. Then we’ll start talking about other hideous colors like baby poop green. Then we’ll start talking about the fact that when babies are first born, their poop doesn’t stink until the first week is over and then it smells like the worst smell you’ve ever smelled. And so on and so on. First we were talking about high school and now we’re talking about fowl-smelling baby shit. I call these occurrences “conversational tangents.” That’s all conversations are: a series of tangents.

I get lost in Wikipedia. I simply love it. I’m on a wiki page, and then some of the words are clickable links to their Wikipedia page. It’s fantastic! I’ll be reading about Hawaii, then I click on “highest mountains”, then I click on “Mount Everest”, then I click on “Great Trigonometric Survey”, then I click on “India”, then I discover that the population of India is 1,147,995,904!! And then I learned something. I love surfing Wikipedia. I could do it for hours… and do.

So, in many ways, conversational tangents are a lot like Wikipedia.

End of post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not sure where to post this but I wanted to ask if anyone has heard of National Clicks?

Can someone help me find it?

Overheard some co-workers talking about it all week but didn't have time to ask so I thought I would post it here to see if someone could help me out.

Seems to be getting alot of buzz right now.

Thanks