Oddments of High Unimportance

One of the sweet ironies of my time at SILS was that I entered with a long-term interest in personal information management, yet I never took a single PIM class nor did any research on it.

Another of my long-term interests is human memory and my personal library has always had lots of memory books, starting with The Memory Book on up to Moonwalking with Einstein, with a diversion through Francis Yates' magisterial The Art of Memory.

My last literature review project as a PhD student combined these two interests. It was on the topic of prospective memory, a charmingly oxymoronic term that has been described as "remembering to remember." Herewith, a post that compresses some of that research because I thought it was too interesting not to share.

Over the 2010 Christmas vac, I took six books with me but read only one: the 700-page The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter. The book is a compilation of emails exchanged between Doctor Who producer/head-writer/show-runner Russell T. Davies -- the man we have to thank for the series' 2005 reboot and reimagining -- and Benjamin Cook, a young reporter for the Radio Times magazine and the monthly "Doctor Who Magazine." Cook initiated the exchange just before David Tennant's final season as the Doctor. The first email in the book, in fact, is Cook asking to do an article on the nuts and bolts of how a script is written, from inception to filming. Fortunately for us, Davies rather cheerfully and enthusiastically took the risk of exposing his process to Cook. That's an element of Davies' psychology that emerges throughout the book: he puts himself into uncomfortable places where he feels particularly vulnerable, though it scares him to death. I admire that a lot. But another less attractive aspect of his personality is that, once in those spaces, he squirms and fidgets and complains until he tires himself out and realizes that, well, this is where he chose to be.

As Davies says elsewhere in the book, he'd never be able to write a proper, straightforward "here's how to write a script" manual. His process is too personal, interior, and -- to an uncomfortable, disquieting degree -- emotionally shredding. His emails are chatty, breezy, and one could have probably squeezed all the air out of those emails (especially the one-line bantering and texts between he and Cook) and shortened the book by a good 300 pages.

On my old blog, I devoted a long post to thinking about moral and ethical responses to panhandling.

One economist suggested only giving money to those who are not asking for money; a playwright suggests giving when you feel charitable and holding back when you don't.

I was reminded of that old post by this Yahoo News article on a street panhandler who, when arrested, claimed to have made $60,000 last year from begging.

I have thoroughly enjoyed showrunner/head writer Steven Moffat's fresh take on Doctor Who, and I've equally enjoyed Matt Smith's take on the character and the deepening relationship between the Doctor and his new companions, Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill). Part of the excitement may have been being in on Seasons 5 and 6 as they've been broadcast; I came to the 2005 reboot late and gorged on Netflix streaming of the episodes as my school and work schedule allowed.

The problem with coming to the show late was that the conversations around the episodes had already happened, so it was like coming to a party late only to find the leftovers -- paper plates, cups, empty bottles and cans, and handsful of snack foods strewn all over the counters and tables -- after all the people have left the house and moved on to the next party. So part of my excitement about seeing the episodes as they've aired is also waiting to see what the reviews are like, whether I agree with them, leaving comments, and joining in the conversation myself.

I do have to often remind myself -- this is just a TV show and there are reasons beyond reasons why stories and seasons work out as they do. Reading The Writers Tale by previous showrunner and the man responsible for the series reboot Russell T Davies showed just how haphazard and crazy-making is the production that goes on behind the scenes. I'm sure Moffat's reign has been no different. That so many good episodes get made that delight so many people is something to be thankful for, and I usually find something to enjoy even in the so-so episodes.

Wikipedia has become such a daily part of my online life (like email -- remember life before email? Anyone?), that it's both startling and a little thrilling to find outré articles or even stray sentences and paragraphs that make me do a double-take and read them again to make sure I read them right.

There's something about that flat, unemotional, just-the-facts style that makes the bizarre content even more absorbing and, in some cases, hilarious. Like in high school, when we were first introduced to the thesaurus and promptly looked up all of the synonyms for "prostitute." (Forgive! We were kids! The words sounded funny!)

Herewith, a selection of Wikipedia articles that have caught my eye over the years. And stuff that I spent way too much time this evening discovering for this post.

Some excerpts are just sentences that I found worth keeping or pondering; others will, I hope, lead you to click through and read the full articles. There are many funny, weirdly interesting, unusual, poignant, and even downright creepy stories lurking within Wikipedia's vast and lightly inhabited archive.

At the bottom of this post are some links that can help you with your own explorations.