SURFIN’ SAFARI

by Steven Steinbock

This week I’m bereft of any original thoughts or themes to share with you in this week’s edition of Bandersnatches. Almost bereft. Anyhow, a common form of blog column consists of annotated links to interesting and relevant websites. Allow me to share some of the gleanings of my web-surfing forays.

Against my normal, meandering nature, my web-browsing has been fairly goal-directed this summer. I suppose that’s because I’m working on a book and doing my best not to let my browsing habits suck up my productivity. It’s hard to stay on the straight and narrow path when web-browsing, though. Even Weather.com contains links to videos, headlines, and an On this date article (which, as I write this the day before publication, happens to be about a 1778 hurricane that prevented a major British-French sea battle along the Rhode Island coast).

The two websites I’m most likely to visit multiple times during a day are Wikipedia and Dictionary.com (as well as the latter’s sister site, Thesaurus.com).

Without getting into the well-trod discussion of how Wikipedia often contains inaccurate, biased, and incomplete entries, it remains my favorite reference site for getting a quick and dirty overview on just about anything. (I can understand why teachers don’t allow their students to use Wikipedia as a source in their research papers, but it’s still of heck of a good starting point).

On any given day, the Wikipedia main page is filled with Today’s featured article, In the news, Did you know…, and On this day…. Normally these sirens of temptation have little or no pull on me. but a week or so back, I was delighted to see that the featured article of the day was about sentence spacing. There was little there that I hadn’t already learned while researching my January 7 blog column. But it was still interesting reading.

The website where I’m likely to find interesting sidebar articles on a regular basis is Dictionary.com, with its Hot Word Blog. A few of the interesting topics of late have been What do “corny” and “corned beef” have to do with plain-old “corn?” (which contains a link to another blog entry on hamburgers, hot dogs, and frankfurters), this this one about links between “hoax,” “hocus pocus,” and the Eucharist, and this one about tuxedos, yarmulkes, and honeymoons (all relevant to the Clinton/ Mezvinsky wedding)