All the rumors are true; what they say about assumption, I mean. It makes an ass out of me... for example, take broccoli. I've thought for years, probably because some random friend or other whose every word I didn't automatically assume was bull-pucky said it over lunch or something, that broccoli was engineered in a lab in the 50s. You know, like a cross between cauliflower, the mustard plant, and I don't know, asparagus or some odd green thing. A real frankenveggie. So I look it up on Wikipedia, and it was apparently around in Roman Empire times. True, it came about because of man's artificial selection for the suppression of flower development in the wild mustard plant, but not by some Dexter in some agro-freakshow lab. Just the usual old farm-guy way of doing things, like breeding milk-giving prarie dogs into cows or whatever. (Okay that was a joke... prarie dogs, heh. Everyone knows that cows really were bred from whales and horses!)
Now, you might think that I am leading into something, that I have a point about dirty rotten jerks who assume things about you without checking out Wikipedia first, but I don't. I am really quite astonished about the whole broccoli kafuffle. Crazy! But, you know, this is still a cautionary tale... it actually makes me wonder if I should be putting so much faith into Wikipedia... I'm just assuming that it has all of it's Brassica Oleracea facts straight... Wikipedia is, after all, an open source encyclopedia. Anyone can type in whatever they want for any entry... that's part of it's strength and also a weakness, obviously. For instance, my former employer has his own Wikipedia page, and when I stumbled on it last night, I tested the whole open source thing by adding a paragraph on to his biography stating that, even though he is close to 70 years old, he has the fine youthful appearance and vigor of a much younger man of, say, 58 or so, and that the secret to his youthful mien was his little known and never discussed habit of raiding abortion clinic garbage bins and sucking the juice right out of whatever's left, only sometimes supplementing his diet with shark babies. I was going to tack on a few choice tidbits of his alleged sexual harassment of certain former employees, but I decided to forgo that particular mischevious, well, evil character defamation.
Anyway, I clicked save, reloaded the page, and there it was! Muah hah hah ha ha!!!! Man that was awesome. Well, of course after ten minutes or so I went back and deleted it, because the man has enough problems, and so do I. I decided to bow out of that potential lawsuit. And anyway I was simply testing the wiki-water. I mean, it would have been caught by a mediator, or whatever they call them, sooner or later and deleted because I was unable to provide a reputable resource to back up my claim, but who knows how long it would have sat there before it got caught! I wanted to test that too, actually, but I'm not sure what kind of trouble that would get me in, and anyway it's just not nice. But dude, it was frikken funny. You shoulda been there, yo! Har har.
I am frightfully, painfully emotionally retarded, I know it.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.