I am not "The Internet with Boobs"

B invented that term for me. But it's not quite true. I, do however, have what seems like an impressive ability to dredge up seemingly obscure facts from my memory.

My colleagues at work have endless fun trying to find something about which I don't know something.
Like asking me if there was ever a game show involving a goat with an aqua lung and Henri Bergson.

The answer is "yes" by the way. 1969. Monty Python. The show was called "Spot the Brain Cell".

But the reason is far more prosaic. It's simply because I'm old. I'm 55 (well nearly 56 but who's quibbling). I grew up in a world of broken iPads (Books as they were called then) and I had an insatiable appetite to find out what the f*ck was going on. So I read. And read. And read. And still do.

I find young people today far too willing to have their whims satisfied by quick facts. When I had a whim, I had to work at it. They're called libraries, people! We grew up in a world without plastic. No gadgets. So if we had to figure something out, we had to dig. And dig. And dig. We found out eventually what it was that we were looking for, but in the process absorbed tons of other stuff that made life worthwhile.

So if the process of satisfying a whim about why so many of my grand parents hated Germans, I discovered that Russian MIG-15 fighters where based on designs made by German engineers and that there was this guy called Demajanuk who was a concentration camp guard (who's died yesterday aged 91 btw) and that he was at Sobibor about which movies and TV series were made and... and... and... You get the picture.

The point is I had to WORK FOR IT. I didn't have wikipedia or anything else for a quick fix. All the data that is available at a click and tap seems to me to be destroying the act of discovery and the osmosis of interesting stuff. I absorbed. And absorbed.

So in a sense, I am the internet with boobs. So maybe B is right.