A no-leafed Clover and the main event

There are times that I am just amazed by the amount of information that we have at our fingertips. Never before has there been such a wealth of information just there, ripe for the picking at any moment. The flip side to this is that there exists the possibility of slipping into the vortex of the internet with no warning. A quick "oh, I'm just going to check this one web site fast" can frequently result in me randomly Wikipedia-surfing or stream-of-consciousness surfing from one site to another until I wonder what happened to my morning or why it's suddenly 2AM.

I don't know how it happened, but the other morning, I was reading about Cloverfield (a movie I am overdue to rewatch, but sadly, one that will not make for good viewing on my iPod) on Wikipedia. I got to wondering, as I am apt to do, if the monster had its own Wikipedia entry. By George, it (he?) does. I was amazed and intrigued and enthralled. Of course, I read every last bit of it. The actual article is about the creation, concept and design of the creature and I would have preferred it to have been written as if Clover actually existed - kind of in the vein of the Anchorpoint Essays, which are highly detailed scientific analyses of the Xenomorph from the Alien movies (referred to as Internecivus raptus on the site - I love them for giving it binomial nomenclature!!) But then I found that article here.

I love living in a world where a movie monster gets its own online encyclopedia article. Seriously, when you think about the World Book encyclopedia or whatever, what are the chances that Clover would get his own entry? Slim to none. But there it was.

As Heidi was telling me from a book she read (The Long Tail, I think) - yes, Wikipedia is fallible, but what source of information is not? It also self-corrects very quickly and people doing the writing (for the most part) feel passionately about their subject material, so they are going to strive to make it as accurate as they can. And passionate people are the best type, even when you don't necessarily share their passion.

And it's the gift that keeps on giving. Tonight I was listening to the interminable 11 minute extended remix of Streisand's "The Main Event/Fight" and it made me wonder what its origins were as it was clearly not an amateur-made mix. As it turns out, it was actually on the soundtrack to The Main Event and although the movie was a dog, the song is quite a good slice of late 70s disco! But perhaps my favorite version was the WTF! moment on one of her latter-day tours during which she actually performed the song.



The juxtaposition of the cheesy disco and Barbra's huge ball gown just crack me up.

And yes, I just did a blog post that managed to mention both a 350-foot tall movie monster and a Streisand disco song.

As Jeff and I would say, "Calzone for Barb." (#3)