Christopher Saint's Humor Column

Ahhhhh, what's that smell? Can you smell it? It's tangy, and subtle, and sweet, yet just a tad bitter, with a slight burnt tinge to it. Is that the smell of Mom's best Tangerine Tang Chicken? Or maybe it's the restaurant down the road whipping up a batch of Stewed Sloth ala Plumb?

No, my friend, that is the smell of fresh information! And it's coming from the internet! mmmm MM! I can't wait to taste some of that stuff, warm, right off the website; chewy, but not slimy, juuuuussst right. With a glass of milk.

It's the perfect snack for one of those warm midsummer days, when the cool blandness of the milk is the perfect counterpoint to the oozing warm sweetness of the information.

You know, it's funny, but these days it seems so natural to have new information literally at my fingertips. All I have to do is pour myself a glass of milk and "voila," a perfect midday snack. However, life was not always this idyllic. No indeed.

Why, I remember a period in my life when I would go for weeks at a time absorbing hardly any new information. They say you learn things everyday, but mainly what I learned in those days was that Tree A was, in fact, harder to climb than Tree B, just like Bobby said.

Coming by even this fairly minor information was no small feat. First, Bobby would offer me a hypothesis, as follows:

"I climbed that tree, and then I climbed THAT tree, and THAT one was harder to climb, cause I slipped and nearly fell. In fact, if it hadn't been for my keen sense of balance and cat-like reflexes, I would have said some really bad words. It's good I didn't, 'cause mom had the window open."

First, for the sake of clarity, let us assign distinct variables to the different trees. Let "THAT tree" equal "Tree A" and let "that tree" equal "Tree B".

Now, as you may remember from High School (which was NOT a source of information, we'll cover that later) the Pythonion Theorem states, "If Tree A is not harder to climb than Tree B, then we must draw the conclusion that Bobby is a moron and should be belittled if at all possible."

This is a very good rule of thumb in many situations, and you should always remember it. Also, I highly suggest you memorize some commercial jingles, because God knows we don't remember enough of those already.

So, in my quick and youthful mind, I instantly hit upon a test. A test that would conclusively prove whether or not I was just as much of a moron as Bobby. I would climb both trees myself.

Here is where the complex mathematics of youth come in. The Theory of Not Looking Really Dumb in Front of People Who Will Mock You Mercilessly Until You Are Old and Gray, states, "If you are halfway up Tree A and discover that Bobby was indeed correct and that Tree A is MUCH harder to climb, you MUST NOT look like you are having a hard, and even life-threatening time of it."

It is times like these when you learn either to pray, or to curse under your breath. Or sometimes both.

So there I am, halfway up Tree A, and the branches are really thin, and the tree is swaying not-so-gently in the wind, and I am saying, under my breath, something like, "Dear God, if you get me out of this *Bleeping* tree alive, I promise I'll never say *Bleep* again!"

Anyway, I manage to get down without dying, ("Thanks God!"), and I even manage (despite the shaking of my knees) to say something casual sounding, like, "Well Bobby, I think that you're right, Tree A does rate a slightly higher difficulty than Tree B."

But that's not the point. The point is that information was much harder to come by back in those days. Now we have information positively coming out the wazoo, even if we still aren't sure just what a wazoo is.

Some even go so far as to say that we have too much information. I think that the time has come for a farm metaphor. In this age of information, some become too addicted to the sweet indulgences of the vast outpouring of information, and they eat like a pig at slop time, but the slop just keeps coming and coming, and they just keep eating and eating, until eventually they weigh the same as a Greyhound Bus, and they spend their days wallowing in regurgitated information, until finally the farmer comes along and makes ham out of them.

This is truly a sad state of affairs, and I really think we should do something about it. But not just now, cause there's this great article I want to read. It's all about how someone has cloned three-eyed toads in a lab where they were trying to distill water in a more efficient way.