It's a small world after all. Not only is this an incredibly annoying Disney song, it has become a bit of a mantra in our internet age. Anyone with even free web space given to them by their ISP, can be seen by anyone in the WORLD with an internet link. I think the living population is at close to seven billion at last count (6.8 to be exact). I remember when it was just six billion. Boy, those were the days. Actually, it was in the year 2000. Fortunately, growth is a lot more linear than some graphs I've seen. What isn't linear yet is the internet population. Nearly 27% or 1.8 BILLION IP's out there.
Douglas Adams (sorely missed) wrote about the ultimate torture chamber in one of his four-part Hitchhikers "trilogy". It is called the Total Perspective Vortex. Mixed with a little agnostic theology, he tells of a scientist who was able to put his holistic theories into practice by extrapolating the universe as a whole from any manageable part of the universe; say, a piece of fairy cake. He plugged one end into some cake, the other end into his wife (who constantly was on him about getting some sense of perspective), and turned it on. The result was that she was presented with a full understanding of the breadth of the universe with millions of galaxies over billions of light-years, only one of which was expanded to show billions of stars. One small, insignificant star was centered on with an arrow pointing to a minute dot of a planet, and an infinitesimal dot on that dot with a label saying, "You are here." The result with his wife was not pretty and he discovered that one thing we all definitely don't need is a sense of perspective.
I googled my name. I always thought it was a unique name. There are a dozen of us out there - and that's just the ones with web presence. Jacki lopped the "e" off of her original name to be unique. Dozens! I tried "John and Jacki". Great Googly Moogly! There is a bunch! I decided, introvert that I am, to create a web presence for my family. I had to laugh about how much we would stand out (pages are in the billions). That is why I thought of duplicate houses lined up for our home page. One of them is winking showing that we are hidden but still there. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox (from the Hitchhiker's trilogy mentioned earlier), we can walk out of the Total Perspective Vortex torture chamber and say, "Yeah. I saw it. Pretty cool place."
I think I finally figured out our lawn. We have fed and weeded the thing and agonized over mulching or catching. We rent the place, so the lawn we inherited was virtually choking to death from either being over-mulched or just not raked. The last four years since we started renting this place, I have never mulched (unless our son-in-law helps - it gets mulched then). I think it looks a lot better than it did but I have always heard of the benefits of occasional mulching. Is this boring or what???
After letting it grow for a few weeks I went out to mow it in stages (mow ten feet, empty the catcher, mow ten feet, empty the catcher…) when I was struck with a revelation that I believe came from the grass itself. What I heard was, "Open the side of the mower and let it fly. Rake it up and why not pick up some dog poop while you are at it?" If I could come to this kind of agreement with my own lawn, why not use this gift to enhance the lawns of rich people all over the nation (at about $50,000 a pop). Thoughts started formulating about how I could market my lawn-whispering career to rich people everywhere and I thought, "Of course! Lawn whispering is pretty unique. It would be google-able for anyone who got a burr up their hinny to need a lawn whisperer!"
I googled it. Holy cow!! There's a thousand lawn whisperers out there. There goes my dream of getting psychically in tuned with some wall-street wife's lawn for six figures. What other kinds of whisperers are out there? Take ANYTHING and type "whisperer" after it and you'll find it. There are dog whisperers and cat whisperers; tree whisperers; forget being a ghost whisperer - the TV show has taken the first 20 pages of Google; there are goat whisperers; there's even a money whisperer out there…
I got zero hits on Alien Whisperer! Are there any rich people vexed by extraterrestrials? Granted farmers are not rich but those crop circles probably take quite a bite out of their crops. Naw. I don't think it would even cover my cost to exorcise aliens from wheat fields. Wait…
What I need is rich people's lawns being messed with by extraterrestrials. They would say, "What's up with grass circles in my lawn?? My jockey hitching post is pointing due north and my flamingos are stacked in pyramids! I need the Alien Whisperer!" Thus will start my career of (don't tell) mowing rich people's lawns in the middle of the night and raking the grass in to circles - along with creative things done with jockeys and flamingos. Then, just sit back and wait for the calls.
I just got this email from Jacki today. They are great one-liners about the economy. I thought of putting it on Frog but decided to just add it here. Imagine Rodney Dangerfield (I guess I'm dating myself) on the Tonight Show doing these: