The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge is hosted by Long and Short Reviews. This week’s topic is: recent topics I’ve Googled.
As someone who writes for fun, this can often be a enlightening topic. The things you look up so that you’re at least somewhat accurate can be… interesting… if not educational. In the past, I’ve looked up Romani funeral rituals, herbal cold remedies, and discovered hallucinogenic cactus (mescaline).
However, what I’ve looked up lately has been much more benign.
Saginaw, NY. I was watching a movie called Things Heard and Seen last night with my kids. It’s on Netflix and is set in Saginaw, NY. I had to look this up because the only Saginaw I’d ever heard of was in Michigan.
Swedenborg (as well as Innes). Also a result of the movie mentioned above. The main character mentions a painter named Innes and another brings up Swedenborg which led me to look him up because he becomes a talking point in the movie as well.
Yeah, yeah, sometimes I wonder how I manage to keep track of the plot when I’m randomly Googling things mentioned in the movie/TV show I’m watching.
Converting centimeters to inches. A friend has three kids and all three of them have lesions on their brains. The girls are fine – all three are adults living on their own and are healthy. She mentioned that one of her girls was seeing a neurologist in order to stay on top of the lesions and make sure that things are all good. My friend said that the lesion this daughter has was either 7 mm or 7 cm. I had assumed she meant mm, but looked up the conversion of 7 cm to inches to get a comparison. Definitely mm.
David Ellis. I’m currently reading The Red Book by James Patterson and David Ellis. Most of James Patterson’s novels are set either in New York or San Francisco and this one is set in Chicago. So, I looked up David Ellis on Amazon (so not really Googling, I guess, but Amazoning?) and viola! He’s a Chicagoan. Why these things matter to me, I don’t even know. But it’s apparent he’s a Sox fan and not a Cubs fan and that’s just not right, Mr. Ellis (although I harbor no ill will re: the White Sox).
Romani Folk Tales. This was purely by accident. I have been studying the Romanian language for a year or more now and a podcast I listened to suggested reading fairy tales in the original language as a way to help learn the language. So, I searched for books on the subject. Since the largest concentration of Roma are in Romania, I was naturally led to Romani folk tales as well. This will also help with future fiction since my favorite detective, Andrej Zeklos, is a Romanian Roma. Zayne, on the other hand, is just a brat.
Nerdy Reader Girl 
Romani folk tales sounds like an interesting thing to google for sure!
LikeLike
Yeah, I thought so, too! Can’t wait for the book to arrive honestly. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wide variety of interests, it’s good to have some place to find out things.
LikeLike
Thanks! I like to be well-informed, hahaha.
LikeLike
Nice variety. I like to google the authors, too.
LikeLike
Thanks! I think it’s interesting to have a bit of an author’s backstory before you start reading one of their books, it helps you connect sometimes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I watch tv with my phone next to me and google everything I don’t know about too. Its actually fun.
LikeLike
It’s like a treasure hunt!
LikeLike
Amazoning… lol… I do IMDB-ing quite a lot, so there you go.
LikeLike
Hahahaha… I kind of enjoy making up words, so I say these are both valid. 😀
LikeLike
See, Romanian is an interesting language to me just because it’s so completely different from everything around it. (I don’t speak it at all, though.) But looking up folk tales to help with your language acquisition? That’s a great idea.
LikeLike
It is very interesting! I’ve been doing some reading about it as well and there’s a theory that it’s closer to traditional Latin than any other Latin-based language, which I find intriguing.
The fairy tale idea came from my high school German teacher. She encouraged us to find children’s books (often full of fairy tales) to help us learn the basics of the language. Plus, it’s fun! It’s just much harder to find things in Romanian. English, German, French, even Italian are easier to find.
LikeLike
That was neat. How’s the language study going? It must be great to study a language out of pure interest.
LikeLike
Thank you! 🙂 It’s going okay, I think. Not sure I’m confident to hold a conversation with someone, but I am enjoying myself. I agree – it sure wouldn’t feel like fun if I was doing it for work or something.
LikeLike