Quote:
Originally Posted by captnjack
Geo your are a fountain of knowledge...where do you find this stuff?
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What started off with little hand-drawn charts of English nobles & kings has turned into a 200,000+ person database that I can only keep sorted out using a computer. For me part of the fun was learning a little about someone's background when I decided to add them in, coupled with the research & digging through musty, dusty old books and scanning microfiche & microfilm (when I started, I didn't have a PC--I got one 5 years later, when a top-of-the-line PC was the Pentium 133), and then there's the jigsaw effect. Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle that's all face-down, you don't know how many pieces it has, exactly, and trying to sort it out by learning what clues each piece has and then filling them in. (I actually used to do that stuff when I was a kid with MC Escher puzzles.) But to be honest my knowledge is pretty scatter-shot anymore. I'm not 100% sure what got me thinking about Boris Johnson & Barack Obama--might have been listening to the radio where Mick Fleetwood was being interviewed, which reminded me of John Entwistle (they sound similar in conversation, and kinda look similar, at least their noses), which reminded me of Boris the Spider which I guess is what made me think of Boris Johnson. And then a little later I had cable news on and naturally they were talking about the Obama administration and so maybe somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of my mind (places no one should go without taking precautions), up popped the whole slavery thing. That, I think, has been rolling around in the back of my mind for a couple months now because it appears that relatives of mine were involved in the American slave trade--and I have no southern ancestry. Back the beginning of the year, I read an article about Rhode Island's slave trade which continued right up 1842 (I did have to look that up). Anyway, a lot of what I come up with actually comes from what I dug up back a decade and more ago which a trusty PC and a couple nice programs keep track of for me now. I can honestly say, though, that I don't think I'd do so well standing behind a lectern teaching nowadays--the bits & pieces are there in my noggin, they just aren't so well organized today.
Truth is, I'm an information junkie, and I love problem & puzzle solving. One upon a time I thought it would be great to be an intelligence analyst, more in the Robert Redford/Three Days of the Condor vein than the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan (or Jack Bauer) line. To that end, I liked surveying some of the bigger blogs (i.e., Kos, Red State, Talking Points), watched the various editorial programs on cable news (i.e., O'Reilly, Olbermann) and so on. Back in college, I used to watch C-Span & C-Span2 a lot, especially the foreign broadcasts (i.e., Prime Minister's Questions during Maggie Thatcher's, John Major's and Tony Blair's governments, BBC World, CBC with Peter Mansbridge), surveyed various papers (WSJ, NY Times, Wash Post--my favourite), listen to NPR regularly (I'm actually tired of the opinion programs, from Rush to Air America). Anyway that's what drives me, for what its worth. Oh, just a "fun fact" sort of, but I actually have a distant cousin who happens to be married to someone with almost exactly the same surname as Rob--just with an "i" instead of a "y". Weird, huh?