Quidditch, Zoroastrianism, and the Languages of Papua-New Guinea

I am so grateful for the Internet and all its trappings. I am no longer an idiot to my children when subjects that I should have read about and remembered somewhere in my fifty years resurface in a high school assignment, a grade school composition or a college application.  I nod in agreement on whatever the subject, then sneak off to use Safari on my iPhone.  Don’t tell them.  It will dispel the myth that Mom is some kind of genius.  I’m just really curious, warding off a head slapping V-8 moment, and really embarrassed to look stupid.

It’s not my first stealthy acquisition of recovered knowledge.  Medical school and residencies were also fraught with similar schemes of one-upmanship.  Only then, our peripheral brains were carried in over sized pockets with indexes of medical tidbits, charts, equations and definitions.  Assignment clipboards had the “Wash U” manual attached as a cookbook for saving both your patient’s lives and your dumb ass.  Thank you mini-Harrison’s textbook, too.

Its enough to have Attention Deficit Disorder.  I listen to music on the radio sometimes and think “Am I singing those lyrics right?  Okay, a quick look at www.azlyrics.com at a long stoplight  and “Mad drool all the way”  becomes the correct “Mad bull has lost his way,” from Gimme Shelter. And apparently that is a reference to the cruel behavior of a Texas Sheriff during the civil rights movement. Thank you Wikipedia and 3G.

I am not the only one.  How many times do you now have to beep your horn at someone who didn’t notice that the lights had changed?  

I read the news today, oh boy….Thank you, New York Times on-line.

The sudden storm we recently experienced in the Baltimore-Washington area with gale force winds, a deluge of rain but without a hurricane warning became a “derecho,” a word I had never heard of before and still mispronounce.  Thank you, Merriam Webster on-line.  

Derecho is pronounced:  day- ray-cho.  Thank you  www.forvo.com/word/gazetteer/  

Different accents are also available. The British always sound better and more intelligent than Americans, except for that "schedule" thing.

And for those who are just curious:

Quidditch is the game played in Harry Potter but also now in over 300 universities and high schools.  Thanks, www.internationalquidditch.org.

Zoroastrianism was formerly a major religion in the world and now only practiced by approximately 190,000 followers.  Thank you, www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/zoroastrian/ataglance/.

And there are over 350 languages and dialects spoken in Papua -New Guinea. Again, what would we all do without Wikipedia.

Googlito ergo sum.

Perverse Latin for “I google therefore I am.”  

I am not the only one. Imagine that,  John Lennon (and azlyrics.com). 

And yes I googled “Google” to get the image above.