Beech Tree News Network

It drives my husband, Garey, crazy when he asks me a question—or even wonders aloud about something he doesn’t understand—and I grab my cell phone to look up the answer.  I don’t know why, unless it’s that so much can be answered by so few keystrokes, and that process has turned me into a know-it-all or maybe, he feels left out of the process.  I don’t mean left out in the terms of not having access to the same technology.  He has an iphone and the same access to the internet the rest of us have.  I’m talking about left out because “answers at your fingertips” reduce the need for reasoning or conjecture, and Garey is a big fan of reasoning and conjecture.
    Before the widespread use of the internet and cell phones, people like Garey would ponder questions put to them by people like me then come up with a reasonable explanation as to why so-and-so had happened or what so-and-so was or what so-and-so would probably do.  Garey could go on for hours about stuff on which there was no readily-available information, and most of the time, his reasoning and explanations made a lot of sense.  The only problem is that people like me don’t have hours to wait for an answer.  Today, I don’t have to.  I suspect the guys who developed the internet and cell phones were like me—in a hurry to understand and get on with it.
    I admit it gives me a certain sense of power to have that much information at my fingertips.  I understand the caution to not believe everything I read on the internet or at least take a lot of it with a grain of salt, but I have always been the curious sort, and information satisfies that curiosity; plus the internet offers the bonus of entertaining me with the way the information is presented. The process has become edutainment for me.
    I remember the very first time I looked up information on my cell phone.  I was watching a mystery/crime show when the name Typhoid Mary came up. “Who was she?” I wondered out loud.  That thought was followed by, “Wait a minute, I can look that up.”  I did, and there she was in an old black and white photo on Wikipedia.  (Mary Mallon (1869-1938) was an Irish cook living in the U.S. and forced to endure three decades of isolation after she was identified as a carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever.  It is believed she infected 51 people during the course of her life.)
    Pandora’s Box was opened and there was no stopping me.  I look up virtually everything I’m not sure of, like the number of milliliters in an ounce or the correct spelling of “holiday” (wouldn’t you think there would be two “Ls”?) or medical definitions (a PE blood clot is one caused by a pulmonary embolism).  Sometimes, I try to find information just to see if I can.  I view it as a treasure hunt.
    Recently, I saw a new Nationwide Insurance commercial, featuring Peyton Manning.  Peyton does several ads for that company, and he always sings lyrics he seems to make up on the spot to the tune of “Nationwide is on your side.”  The latest ad features Peyton holding up a pair of Bermuda shorts adorned with embroidered crawfish and singing, “Crawfish shorts I like your style.”
    “I wonder if they really make those shorts,” I said to Garey.
    “I hope not,” Garey said, “They’re hideous!”
    “I don’t mean for you,” I said, “I mean for me.  I love them!”
    It took me just a minute to locate the shorts on the website of Perlis, a southern clothing company in Louisiana.  It turns out, they have a whole line of crawfish clothing, including men’s shorts, shirts, hats, ties, women’s dresses, tank tops and button-downs, but no women’s Bermuda shorts.  This was an outrage.
    “I’m writing the company!” I said, “Better yet, I’m writing Peyton Manning!
    There have to be thousands of women who are Broncos fans like me, I thought, and Peyton will surely take up our cause and right this injustice.  In the meantime, I decided to browse the other products in the women’s clothing line: Ladies Crawfish T-shirt $35; Ladies Crawfish Rugby dress $95; Ladies Crawfish Oxford blouse $65.  Okay, so maybe I wouldn’t be writing the company or Peyton, because even if they added ladies Crawfish Bermuda shorts to their product line, I couldn’t afford them.
     The quote, “A little information in the wrong hands is a dangerous thing,” came to mind.
    “I wonder who said that,” I thought.  I started to look it up on my phone then thought better of it.  It was probably Garey Hughes.