Provincial Knowledge

I'm going to call it St. Ives device; whereby, I begin talking about one thing, then I'm going to feed you a whole bunch of information which is factual and interesting and will make you forget where I started, until I return to my original topic, at which point I’ll pull it all together as a clever drawstring bundle. I'm sure there's a name for that already, but it is very like the riddle of traveling to St. Ives, where on my way I met a man with seven wives, seven cats, seven kittens, etcetera, but in the end, only I traveled to St. Ives. I myself for real have never been to St. Ives, but it is a provincial seaside town, and just north Penzance.

In my own provincial seaside town, we have a light house, a three hundred year old fort, dolphins in the bay, a breeding colony of artists, twenty-one miles of beach and the rest is history! No, my town does not have the volumes I was accustomed access to at the University. And yet, even in our tiny provincial collection, especially tiny and especially provincial at the branch library, I was trolling around one day and found a copy of the Popol Vuh, which is the exact book of Mayan mythology I needed for my language and culture class at college to draw similarities between the ancient story of crossing into the afterlife and the current situation of Mayan immigrants into the US. My Professor talked about the Popol Vuh, but its very existence at the University library seemed mythological, yet here it is, in my own little town. (Could be the original copy.)

Bangladesh has had digital TV for over 20 years. They didn't have any TV before then, but when they did get it, they got it with the best current available technology infrastructure. Which was digital.

I don't know what I'm going to do in 2009. I've pioneered the non-digital age of electronics to its end so it seems. I think my TV's out of focus now, but I can't really tell. I don't watch very much, and when I do, I'm usually drinking something, especially if I have to endure the Disney Channel. I could have picked up satellite years ago, but I didn’t. Mostly I just watch movies.

My VCR is stuck on French. When you press "play" it says "lecture", and "rewind" is "rebobinage." I'm passively learning a second language while I enjoy movies. It is the French revolution against the English channels.

Pirates of Penzance opened in 1879, five years before the Prime Meridian was set at Greenwich. France and England were both vying for the zero longitude line, each for their own national observatory, but England won out, with the proviso that everyone would adopt France's unit of measure as the world's standard--the meter, which was actually accurately based on the Earth's circumference given in calculations by Eratosthenes in Alexandria back around 100 B.C. (Significantly NOT the measurement of Earth's size used by Columbus, who judged the Earth to be a great deal smaller and thus bumped into the Americas unexpectedly on his way to India.) So England got the Prime Meridian and immediately reneged on using the French metre--England absolutely put her foot down...until recently. And recently we have overcome the Y2K problem (which Alan Greenspan admits to having contributed to by entering computer code in the Sixties in double zeros to indicate 1900). Starting in Greenwich and circling the globe we managed to keep airplanes in the air and financial markets on the ground (which now has reversed itself but not through the cause of computer miscalculation). Yet Unix code today may still create a Y-2K38 problem because of its inability to handle leap seconds, which is the exact same problem young Frederic has in Pirates of Penzance. His contract with said pirates holds him indentured until such time as his twenty-first BIRTHDAY, and NOT his twenty-first YEAR. As Frederic was born on the day of leap year, he will not celebrate his twenty-first birthday until 1940. Obviously this creates a most ingenious paradox, as 1940 was over sixty-eight years ago, and yet that is how the play is still scripted. The funny thing is, is that it's still funny, it's maybe even more funny with this built in vintage humor that no one's likely to remove. Perhaps you have a greater chance at success if you write something not for all time, but for your time, and then see how it endures.

For the time being what it is, we have Google. Thank God for Google. Even in the provinces we have Google, and Google can take you to a nice little ditty ripped off from Gilbert and Sullivan and retitled “Modern Major Googler.” If all goes right, simply paste this link into your browser and enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9KHc6qLXQ

If the link doesn’t work, ask Bill Dovany what he’s getting paid for.