Meandering Down Memory Lane

I just found yet another dispatch to the universe I launched many years ago. It's old as you can tell by the title here in a state with a ten-cent charge for a plastic bag. I called it then:

Used to Be About Paper or Plastic

Walking into the Stop and Shop yesterday afternoon and caught this sentence fragment between a dad and his young lad who were on their way out.

Little Guy (LG): "Which would you rather be? 

Eaten by a shark or a pack of coyotes?"

Bewildered Dad (BD): "What?!? Where's your brother? (spies smaller child over by the Aquapod vending machine) David! Let's go, now!"

So, it turns out there are folks who do watch Shark Week and take it to heart. Wish they'd have come up with someone in addition to a fish taco sponsor, at least online. It's like having lunch in the aquarium cafeteria and discovering they have fish on the menu, as has happened to me. You start mentally reviewing the exhibits you passed through before lunch just in case there was one 'closed for renovation' and it turns out you've now stumbled upon the real reason.

I didn't get to hear which choice Dad opted for though I was impressed with the question. Thanks to technological innovations like the Internet and nearly unlimited channels of cable TV, our children now have access to untold volumes of information, probably more before they start in school than you or I had by the time we graduated from high school. In theory, this is a good thing, though maybe I'm getting crotchety in my antiquity, we're not making better choices as we age because we treat all information as knowledge when a lot of it maybe just closer to noise.

There was a "news" story (the quotes will be evident in a moment), speaking about television about a man in London who watched all 238 episodes of Friends as some kind of a marathon and maybe as an attempt to get an article in the newspaper (Mission Accomplished, by the way) and a website. Very much a reminder that NOT everything that looks like the news is news unless a fish taco sponsor has bought the other side of the page. 

Sort of makes me wish David could have toppled that Aqua Pod machine right on the guy's head. Drowning on dry land after being attacked by a herd of wild and woolly carnivorous wombats, who have neither their own week on television nor the glamour of the old west. No more irony deficiencies around here.

-bill kenny