Talk about Tuesday

I usually don't talk about work here. Well, my rule is that I won't talk about anyone in particular at work, good or bad. I don't know if anyone here reads my blog...but God, I hope not. I want to keep work and personal life as separate as possible. Don't look at my screen, I'm not blogging! What's a blog? Anyways, this has to do with what I learned today, at work.

First, before I get started, I got a flat tire on my way to work, walked my bike too many blocks to work, still got to work by 9:00. Then, walked too far to the bike shop on my lunch break, grabbed lunch and still made it back in my allotted half hour. Damn, I'm good/fast/tight.

Ok, at work, I'm working a contract job where I do fact checking and general cataloging of oral histories (interviews of prominent African Americans.) While doing this fact checking I google just about anything you could imagine. Any proper name, date or geographic location that is mentioned, I verify. I have to admit that my googling adventures can sometimes take me down paths I didn't actually intend to go down. Like today, I needed to get the date of the Jonestown Massacre. Easy, Wikipedia set me up with that (1978, if you care). Then I started to realize that I knew basically nothing about this event except that a guy named Jones supposedly brainwashed his followers into drinking some not-so-nice Kool Aid and ended up killing them. I didn't know where this happened (uh Jonestown is in Idaho, right?) or anything surrounding these events. So, I read more. Turns out, there are plenty of conspiracy theories (not hard to believe) and all sorts of weirdo side plots (a Congressman and others getting shot and killed on the tarmac after visiting Jonestown, prior to the mass suicide). Here's the link.

After that I read about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, another historic catastrophe I of course heard about, but didn't really know any specifics.

Curiosity got the best of me today. I think I will randomly hit up Wikipedia on a more regular basis and fill up my brain. Note to self: on the sprawling bookshelf you intend to have one day, make sure there is a full set of encyclopedias, low to the ground, so the kids can easily reach.

Other stuff I want to know more about: DNA, monkeys or other animals that have been sent to space, Tibet, socialism, velodromes and Chinese propaganda posters.