Something I just thought of: when the Internet became a big deal and I discovered you could look up almost ANYTHING on it, it was like I had woke up in the morning and discovered that someone had build the Library of Alexandria next door. I have a wicked fast reading speed, and I discovered I could sift information out of the hundreds of returns that most search engines gave me in a very short time. I found that given thirty minutes I could probably tell you what God had for breakfast.

In any case, this gave me the ability to almost instantly back up my opinions with hard facts, or at least with other opinions by people more eloquent than I am. Stuff that would have taken me a day of research in the best libraries was at my fingertips, and I could almost immediately flatten opposition with a truckload of references. Each good reference gets bookmarked for future use.

You know what? This is fun.

Maybe this is another reason to go after people with foolish ideas. So what if you don't convince them? It's fun.

Remember this?

"The last encounter many people had with the media prophet Marshall McLuhan was in Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall.' Woody and Diane Keaton are standing in line waiting to get into a movie; behind them a Columbia professor loudly explains the cultural universe to his fawning date. Woody can't bear the pretension. (The adulation the other fellow is getting isn't doing him much good either.) Invisible steam pours out of Woody's ears, but the prof is oblivious; soon he is onto Marshall McLuhan, making a hash of his theories, referring to television, McLuhan's ultimate cool medium, as a hot one, no less.

Woody takes action. He steps out of line and pulls McLuhan himself from behind a poster. Tall and elegantly professorial, McLuhan informs the poor pedant that he hasn't the least clue what he's talking about: 'I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work.' The prof wilts. Woody stares out at the audience with flat satisfaction: 'Boy, if life were only like this.'"

Life IS like this now! I sucked this last quote off the net in four minutes, from an old NY Times archive. Given enough time, I could probably score a bootleg Quicktime file of the actual scene!

The internet is the ultimate reference. The real trick of internet research of course is separating the wheat from the chaff, or in many cases, separating the wheat from the outright ratshit, but that's where reason and common sense come in.

The Web is, like Butt-Head once said, "...is the coolest thing I have ever seen."