As far back as I remember, I was always easily enticed by dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almanacs. Well, guess what. The Web is a crossbred animal containing the steroid-megadosed genes of all three with an abundance of extra stuff that native Louisianans, influenced as we are by our Cajun brethren, like to call lagniappe.
When I cracked open a Merriam-Webster in search of a word as a schoolboy, it was a sure bet that I would discover 10 to 20 other words on my journey. Looking in the rearview mirror, I’ve concluded that I subconsciously started these word trips at points I knew were far from where my destination word would be located. In so doing, I afforded myself more pages through which to wade before terminating my travels at my originally desired word. My odysseys through the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the World Almanac and Book of Facts were also island hops from one morsel of information to another.
Exercising one’s wanderlust in actual bound reference volumes can while away an hour. In virtual travels on a Web surfboard one can ride a wave or sequences of waves for days. Over the course of a profusion of excursions, I have found some interesting places. Some of them have to do with my love of words. Like everyone, I have a favorite dictionary and thesaurus. Mine is Merriam-Webster. Here’s a humorous stumbled-upon site that provides a humorous take on my lexophilia. The place I like to use for encyclopedic information is Wikipedia. Recognizing that it is a sort of commune taking contributions from widespread sources, at least to a degree without immediate editorial oversight, I pull out my imaginary scales of justice to work in tandem with the seat of my pants to judge personal believability. What you get is usually correct, but there have been some high profile cases of questionable, even cow manure (you know what I mean), content. In those cases, I use my IE homepage, Yahoo, to search for the Internet presences of the actual printed encyclopedias.
In conjunction with my love for taking in and understanding words and their sources, I also love spewing them out in printed form, which you already know if you have read my profile or have been here very often. These characteristics of mine lead me to sites about the writing life. One of these is Smith Magazine’s page, which is good place for writers to occasionally hang out. Once there, a fun thing to do is peruse the six-word memoirs readers compose and drop off for the enjoyment of all. They get so many of them that they compile collections of the best ones and publish them in books. They also have a Facebook presence that has an endless supply of memoirs. The idea for these shortest of literary pieces was inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who wrote what he professed was the world’s shortest novel. The six words he wrote were: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
I’m thinking that most readers here will already know about another favorite haunt of mine, which is IMDB. It stands for Internet Movie Database and is the place to go for anything you want to know about movies and television and the people who perform there. There is a similar site, IBDB, for anything Broadway.
One of my absolute favorite sandboxes on the Web is NNDB, which stands for Notable Names Database. Here’s where to go to get the basic facts and some of the smut regarding anyone who is famous or infamous. They list their most important criterion as “persons for whom the public has demonstrated a permanent interest.” One of the things in the pages for a person you look up is sexual orientation. Sometimes I have found information in that regard that surprised me, such as for John Travolta they say “matter of dispute.” If you click on those words on his page, it will provide you with a list of everyone else for whom they list that sexual orientation. They also provide the names of parents, siblings, spouses, and other acquaintances under the headings, boyfriend, girlfriend, and slept with. For instance, Janis Joplin’s page includes three boyfriends, one girlfriend, and nine slept withs. Under the latter heading, there is one girl. One of the guys listed as a slept with is Dick Cavett. They used to have Janis listed as a slept with on Dick’s page, but it has been altered to include only a mother, a father, and a wife. There are some Cavett interviews of Joplin on YouTube (You can hunt for the interview with Joplin and Cavett. This link will actually take you to an early and rare recording of Me and Bobby McGee. I identify with the Kristofferson song, as I also started out "busted flat in Baton Rouge.") in which they seem to exhibit way more than passing familiarity with each other. Who knows? Anyway, information and smut abounds at NNDB. It is interesting to note that NNDB is produced by Soylent Communications. The underlying content of NNDB and soylent green (green wafers made from euthanized corpses and used to feed the overcrowded masses in the eponymous 1973 movie starring Charlton Heston) is people.
If any of these addresses along the Information Superhighway bring you joy or enlightenment, praise Jesus. Since the coin of the realm today is Web sites of interest, I’ll mention in closing that I have added a link to the collection on the right side of my Blogspot page. It is the address at which my cousin, Johnny Barbato, sells his CD, “No Pain, No Gain.” I suppose a lot of folks would classify his music as Southern rock, but what comes through most for me is the grit of the blues. People who can do that well, and I think John is among them, have scratched hard for what they have. Johnny is an Alabama boy now, but he was born and raised in Louisiana. He spent some time in Baton Rouge and New Iberia before he cut his musical teeth in New Orleans, a place where they never talk about a “day the music died.” The name of his band is the Lucky Doggs, which might naturally remind you of the rolling hot dog stands that are found throughout the French Quarter in NOLA. You can click on samples of each cut on the album. Give John a listen. You might just find you’ll want to do some commerce with my cuz.
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