Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Relationships: It's out there

Generally, if you want information on a subject, you can do a simple Google (or Yahoo or MSN or Dogpile or... you get it) search on a few keywords and you have more to read than you could want.

But what if you don't have anything in mind at all? I mean, what if you simply "let your fingers do the walking" on the keyboard and your brain is disengaged? You know, type in some random combination of letters.

I tried "achine". That's not a real word that I know of but, I ended up with pages of URLs. How about "flobar" or "gwist" or "toblast"? Yup, lots of information... that I'd never read. But they all make sense to someone.

Isn't the Internet fabulous? You could spend you whole life typing in random things and still never run out of stuff to read. Ummm... maybe that isn't so wonderful.

Maybe golf is better. I played 9 holes today with Seyed "M.H." [I need to keep that private], another gentlemen who saw me on the first tee and asked if he could join. In the process of playing nine holes, I learned that:
  • He was born in India and moved to what is now Pakistan after the British partitioned that off
  • He is 80-years old and hardly has any wrinkles, plus a pretty good grip on his handshake
  • He was married in 1949 and has five sons, but his wife died four years ago and he almost gave up golf and everything else when that happened... but now he plays three times a week.
  • He has five sons, two of whom are doctors, and one that is a banker and a grandson that is a doctor. The oldest son is 54.
  • He told me that "Seyed" means his family traces their lineage back to Mohammed.
  • He just got back from Washington, D.C.
  • He uses a riding cart because his knees are bad
  • He hits virtually every tee shot in the fairway and about as long as I do
  • He also putts pretty well, but some of his chip shots go haywire
  • He plans to play well into December... something most Michigan players don't do
I could have spent the two hours at my computer typing in random letters and getting random pages of information. But I went outside, got some exercise, had a random meeting with another person, and learned some things that simply aren't on the Internet... and it all made sense.