Down the Rabbit Hole

 

The Internet has given us a lot of things, some of them horrible, but it has also supplied us access to an incredible wealth of information.

I can remember not so many years ago having family members get into intense discussions over many esoteric subjects. They/we would argue for hours and hours and even days and weeks over who was right about something of such utter triviality as to be meaningless. Sometimes we never found out.

Now, you can learn just about anything you want to, almost instantly, and if you are handy with search engine research, you can dig pretty darned deep into the topic of your choice.

A couple of cases in point...a good Facebook friend shared a meme comparing the relative sizes of polar vs black bears. It was a holy cow moment. I probably spent an hour, when I should have been hanging up laundry, delving into just how big bears are. I discovered that a polar bear could easily bump its head on our living room ceiling, which is ten feet above the ugly red shag rug. Dang! I am glad they live a heck of a long way from here. There was a black bear out in our woods a couple of weeks ago, at least according to the trail cams, and that is more than enough excitement for me.

Then there was the matter of the Buffleheads. We saw a little clutch of them during a bird count, energetically diving into the shallows of a nearby lake. It was downright awesome to find them on a CBC as open water is rare here this time of year. My friend and mentor opined that they eat vegetation and are highly popular with hunters as they taste really good. No question that fish ducks, such as mergansers are said to taste like a good dose of cod liver oil, but I thought diving duck=fish duck, and thus disagreed.

Thanks to modern technology, I now know, that although they occasionally dine on mini-minnows, their cuisine of choice consists of crustaceans, insects, and snail-type critters. (The former might explain their tastiness.) It all made sense after I thought about the matter a bit. Most fish ducks are streamlined for catching fast-moving prey, while Buffleheads are fluffy and fat and ridiculously cute. I don't suppose they have to essentially fly underwater like mergansers to catch snails after all.

However, I had to wait to get home to delve into that bit of trivia. No Internet in the 'Dacks. It was like flying blind!

I have to say that I in no way miss those prolonged and tedious discussions about minutia that often plagued our personal argumentative clan. (Montgomerys love to argue and Friers aren't far behind.) Nowadays when I hear one start to brew and bubble here in our normally peaceful living room, with a click of a mouse, clatter of a keyboard, or tap, tap, slide on a cellphone screen, I can shut them all up almost instantly.