Constant Curiosity | Oh look, a duck!

Hello all and welcome to my blog.  They say curiosity killed the cat, but since I'm not a cat, I'm not too worried.  I am worried (just a little) about how to boil down all the interesting things I'm interested in and make them interesting enough for others to read about them.   

O.k., enough worrying.  I like books and art and music and movies and theater, and many, many other things.   When I read a book or see a film I invariably get curious about something or someone in the book and have to look it up.  I understand that one of Amazon's newest Kindles gives viewers a way to look stuff up in IMDB (Internet Movie Database) while watching the film on your Kindle in case you wonder where you've seen that actor before.  My own Kindle Fire offers word definitions at a touch as one reads.   It's a boon to the curious, but that's where the duck comes in.  

To my easily piqued curiosity and equally distractable nature a duck signifies for me yet one more random thing that has caught my attention.  I even know a quote about ducks:  "How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks" says Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.

I'm lucky I work where I do and do what I do, but it's sort of a blessing and a curse, since one thing invariably leads to another.  I had to quit looking at old newspaper microfilm because reading all the articles other than the one I had been looking for was just too fascinating.  I found out one time that Oscar Wilde had actually visited Stockton.  The description of his outfit was quite vivid.  Something about brown velvet trousers and a big green floppy tie. 

These sorts of occasions make me long for the ability to move around in time the way characters in these books & films do: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Time and Again by Nora Roberts, films like Somewhere in Time, The Philadelphia Experiment and Time After Time, starring a young Malcolm McDowell (as H.G. Wells) and an equally young Mary Steenburgen.  David Warner played Jack the Ripper.  In case you were curious.

Well, you get the picture about what my various themes might be...oh look! A rabbit! (Harvey, 1950, starring James Stewart) but wasn't Harvey really a Pooka, a mythological being...sorry gotta go look something up.  See you next time.