of leisure, and the internet

WARNING: further reading may cause information fatigue to the unsuspecting, or uninterested mind..



I’ve been asked a lot these days by my friends about why I keep staying up late at night. It’s actually out of concern, my midnight activities have made me sleepy in class, and I even sleep during breaks, and, even in class sometimes (now this is bad).

I blame it on the internet

It is a well-known fact that most sleep deprivation comes from too much time spent online…coupled with my first experience here-with all the tension of classes and lectures- of a few months of unlimited internet… I’ve become the true internet geek, though I’m not proud of it.

For many the internet offers many different things. Contemporary telecommunication technologies makes it possible to even view live shows, games, news virtually anything. Whole new virtual communities keep showing up, providing a virtual environment for lonely freaks, er… I mean people to connect to others in ways I’ve never dreamed of thirty years ago (that’s definitely true, I wasn’t even born yet)

Ok back to the point..My midnight internet activities. Hmm…have you ever heard the phrase curiosity killed the cat?...well for me it made me nearly nocturnal. I start by opening my pc, checking my email, blog, friendster…then ‘tada’..it’s already tomorrow morning at 2 o’clock…

Ok2 that was a bit exaggerating… I do pray, cook, eat, wash my clothes, do my assignments, buy foodstuffs, play with the household cat, etc. (here's the afore-mentioned cat, by the way- it's been a while eh?)



(trying to catch the shark in the screen..she's really cute, isnt she?)

It’s actually hard to explain this. How about if I give yesterday for an example:

While I was opening my computer, Zam, who was already on his, commented something vague about Volgograd being the sister city of Coventry, London, where some of his relatives live. i got curious as to what sister cities mean…so I wiki’ed it. After a long article about what they actually are, and their significance (in a nutshell, they are like ‘pen-pals’, but involving whole cities, ‘to foster stronger relationships’, and usually they have some thing in common…for Volgograd and Coventry, they were both bombarded/attacked during WW2), and another artivel about twin cities,which had slightly different meanings. At the end, in the list of cities given as examples, the cities Sodom and Gomorrah caught my eyes, this led to other articles describing nearly everything from history and geography to biblical, Jewish and Quranic point of views.
Now ladies and gentlemen, somehow the views from these things, and ancient mythology (Greek, Roman, Chinese and some others) have always been an intriguing topic for me.
Thus a mention of Procrustes compelled me to read more about his legend, and that fascinating part about the procrustean bed and procrustean analysis, used in modern science and mathematics. Next came Theseus, the hero king from Athens who had slain Procrustes with his own method (read Procrustean bed), and his adventures which can be comparable to Heracles (the Dorian hero, Theseus was the Ionian hero). At the end of his journeys, another more interesting fact came with the tale of the ship of Theseus, which was preserved for centuries, but with every (rotting) part changed over the years, giving rise to the Ship of Theseus Paradox: a philosophical debate of the whether it is the same ship or not (other parallel paradoxes are John Locke’s socks, Grandfather’s axe, and even rock bands with the same names but totally different players and Herbie films(the one about the living car).
Theseus’s journeys meets up with a lot of other interesting Greek characters, all with their own wiki articles: Aethra, Amaryllis, the Minotaur,somehow Perseus, another Greek hero, and his best friend Pirithous, their fights with the centaurs, and their final pledge to marry daughters of Zeus, ending in Pirithous’s doom to suffer forever in the underworld because he tried to take Persephone, the wife of the underworld God, Hades, which was unforgivable. Interestingly Theseus was saved by Hercules, during on of the 12 labours of Heracles, which was to obtain the dog Cerberus in the underworld.
And Article about Hades proved equally eye-opening, he wasn’t as evil as we thought. In fact he was more towards passive, more as a balance to the living world, and one of his main attributes was being just. Another article would tell us that during the war with the Titans, the gods were given weapons by the Cyclopes: Zeus with his thunderbolts, Poseidon his trident, and Hades- the Helm of Darkness, which renders him invisible. Before the first battle, Hades used his Helm to sneak into the Titans’ area and destroyed all their weapons. After they had won the war, these Greek Gods decided to divide the realm between them, thus Zeus got the sky, Poseidon controlled the seas, and Hades ruled the underworld.

I skipped things like the Minotaur, as I already read it somewhere else, and there was a whole lot more to read.

It didn’t end there, from the Greeks, I somehow went through the Golden, Silver and Bronze age of DC and Marvel comics, with about 20 different characters ,and the pre and post crisis stuff in the comics (apparently the multiverse in which all those superheroes live in- yeah they tried to round up ALL of their heroes from the start of production till now- was destroyed , and remodeled into only 52 parallel universes, including ours)
Eg of superheroes: superman(obviously), batman, maxima, robin/nightwing, zatanna zatarra, the monitor, antimonitor(responsible for the crisis), starfire (3 of them),Doomsday (died with a superman), parallax, the gren lantern corps, Oa, and many, many pointless others..wasting my time, and probably yours too, by the time you finish reading up to here.

By the time I finished, it was already 3am..or was it 4?



by the way,here are 2 of about 10 webpages i read today...they're very interesting..really



i was worried about my headaches, so this article captured my attention for some time..

http://www.realsimple.com/realsimple/gallery/0,21863,1700343,00.html



i once remarked about this orion in cairo,egypt,the sky was so clear then and i was sure i recognized it. while walking back a few days ago, and today, i saw the same clusters of stars above my roof in volgograd. to make sure, i searched the internet, and this is what i found..fascinating..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)#Orion_in_Islamic_astronomy