I always loved this joke from the Ernie Kovacs ‘Mr. Question Man’ bit:

Q: Mr. Question Man. I am studying Science in high school. It is well known that the Earth is round like a ball, therefore many people must be walking on it upside-down. Why is it that these people do not fall off?

A: You are suffering under a common misconception. People are falling off all the time.

Last Tuesday I was home from work with the flu. A sort of ambulatory flu that left me physically miserable but also bored. Somehow I stumbled upon Yahoo! Answers.

The idea with this service is to provide a community where you can ask questions and gather answers. You use up points when you ask questions, but you can answer others to earn points. I’m not exactly sure what these points are for. Maybe if you get enough you turn into Aristotle or something like that.

From hours looking at this thing I have learned:

- 90% of the audience are optimistic high school kids hoping to con someone into doing their homework. Among the homework they also aren’t doing is keyboarding, so some of the typed questions leave you looking for the Rosetta Stone for translation.

- The other 10% of the audience are weirdly obsessed by the fact that a fictional headmaster of an (also fictional) wizarding school is gay. Why these people aren’t worried instead that the Justice League of America isn’t doing more to get us out of Iraq is beyond me.

- The answers will turn your hair gray. To the question ‘Should I read the Iliad or not?’ (correct answer, “Who the f**k cares what you read? Go read ‘My Pet Goat’ again and stop annoying people.”) I read the answer “Homer is looking at the ideal of a Greek hero and the model has been the warrior, so he looks at Achilles. The Iliad showcases the fatal flaw of the warrior hero - blood lust - which consumes Achilles and leads to his downfall.” (No he isn’t. No it wasn’t. He does examine Achilles’ anger … but it’s his anger with Agamemnon for stealing his girlfriend. And the dead hero at the end or the story that we care about is Hector. Achilles has lost his best friend but is otherwise doing great.)

So now I can’t stop with the smart-ass answers. Here’s today’s:

Q: Curious George and the Puppies.what is the story about?

A: It’s about Curious George, who finds these puppies. There’s something he’s not supposed to do but, well, George is just so curious and he does it and everything gets weird. Anyway, the Man in the Yellow Hat comes along and sorts it out and then it’s all cool.

Sort of Like Gilligan’s Island. But with a Monkey. And puppies.

I am discontinuing use of my Moleskine notebook. It is a fine notebook but won’t lay flat on the desk when open. And I have a habit of reviewing and consolidating notes every couple of days, since otherwise I only remember facts and obligations for about eight minutes. When I do that, I like to discard obsoleted index cards and notebook pages, and I can’t rip pages out of the Moleskine. I mean, I can, but I feel like I am defacing a book. Back to my spiral-bound Tops 9.5×6″.

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In getting rid of the notebook, though, I wanted to capture the following before it is filed away. Found perched on an otherwise useless budget meeting summary:

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And this Trivia of the Unexplained. From Google Maps, an ‘aerial schematic’ of the Boston State House indicates it is … Lobster-Shaped! Coincidence? I think not. Call Mulder and Sculley.

Certain phenomena have a gradual, long-term toxic effect. Like George Bush’s voice or mercury poisoning. Add to my personal list Microsoft operating systems. I’ve had long exposure to these through their entire evolution, but instead of an evolving technological marvel, they always remind me more of a bloated and stagnant bureaucracy.

The prospect of Vista filled me with all the enthusiasm of a visit to the DMV. I’d catch myself on the Apple web site, choosing a MacBook Pro in the online store, selecting all the options, getting a little sick looking at the $4,200 price tag, but still thinking “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Then, deliverance, and from two quarters: First, in an attempt to either exorcise or kill my flawed and temperamental Dell laptop, I wiped the hard disk and installed the free Ubuntu Linux distribution, and it was like drinking a mugful of Felix Felicis. Suddenly my laptop Just Works and is Fast and doesn’t take 10 minutes and jumper cables to boot up.

But the big change was an iMac 24″, a gift from my Mom. As with any Apple product these days, the design just makes you smile. It is fast and works the way you think it should.

Allie cued up ‘Dear Mr. President‘ by Pink and the Indigo Girls tonight. Great song, and it reminded me of the following … from ‘The War Prayer‘ by my buddy Sam, most recently quoted by Richard Belzer on the Huffington Post. The teacher Hillel the Elder, and Jesus, and lots of other smart guys have talked about the idea of ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. And yet in wartime … even against an imaginary enemy like the situation we’re stuck in now … the following inherent contradiction seems to be easily overlooked:

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen”.

- Mark Twain