Goin' Down the Rabbit Hole
In “Alice in Wonderland,” Alice goes through the looking glass into the proverbial rabbit hole and starts her adventures. In today’s world, we enter the rabbit hole through our computers, tablets, phones and tv’s. The only difference is algorithms. They take what we are naturally interested in and push us to what other people who are interested in the same thing are also interested in. I realize that sentence made no sense at all. For instance, if you’re interested in combating pollution, you might get served an article about mulching your leftovers, which might lead you to an article on planting a vegetable garden with the previously mentioned mulch, which might lead to a recipe for garden salads. I frequently read about sports but at the bottom of the articles are what’s known as “clickbait,” articles that ask you to guess what these former sex symbols like Raquel Welch, look like today. After 25 clicks you still haven’t gotten to Raquel Welch, but after they send you to Tom Selleck, you decide you’ve had enough. That kind of thing. So John and I thought long and hard about what kind of rabbit hole we wanted to send Marv down. The obvious one was politics, but that seemed too obvious, so we turned to a rabbit hole John may have gone down himself, although he won’t admit to it. Part of it was he was looking for best exercises for guys with bad knees (I looked at that one myself and found an article saying jogging was good for you and another saying it was the worst possible thing you could do, so my rabbit hole was a fairly shallow one). As for John, he moved upstate to a house he built on a hilltop. One of the activities he enjoys either by himself or with his sons or son-in-law is chopping wood. So is it any surprise Marv went down the rabbit hole about wood chopping? I think not.
But when you chop wood, you need something to do with that wood, which brought us to Rabbit Hole, part 2, in which Marv decides he’ll use all that wood he’ll chop (keep in mind he still has yet to start chopping) as firewood. But he doesn’t have a fireplace. Yet. And that’s the thing with rabbit holes, you just keep digging deeper until you have no idea where you are or how you got there. Which is kind of what this blog feels like today. Now where was I? In any event Marv’s trip down the hole is a 3-parter ending next Tuesday, which is when he will finally come up for air (we hope).
Have a great weekend and please avoid all rabbit holes. We’ll see where Marv ends up next week before exploring what else he does with his spare time in retirement. We spend our spare time writing this comic, besides that, what we do is anybody’s guess.
‘til we meet again,
Andy and John