There is nothing quite as humourous as watching ten plus year old political comedy. This evening, Amy and I spent some quality time with both Teletoon and the Comedy Network. Sunday night is not what I would call ‘the best time all week’ to catch some TV but it was what we had available. It is particularly fruitful in the summer time when there are no new episodes of anything whatsoever.
Tonight we caught an elderly episode of the Simpsons featuring George H. Bush while he was still in power and then a very marginally newer episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes featuring Rick Mercer trying to get interviews with Bill Clinton. There were also some jokes at the expense of Preston Manning and some other Canadian politicians who I assume were in the Reform Party.
I have a feeling that even if I had been of an age where politics were a major facet in my day-to-day life when these shows were written/broadcast, I would have precious little recollection of the ins and outs of the news of the day. As discussed previously and ad nauseum, I have a terrifically short memory (except when it comes to vitally important things like Star Trek trivia or how to execute some fairly basic yo-yo tricks) at the best of times and the minutiae of current events hardly make a blip beyond what is required to be able to discuss them with co-workers. This has got me thinking about the transient nature of just about everything in my day-to-day experience.
I am something of an internet junkie (as Amy will, I’m sure, attest strongly) and I have roughly 150 RSS feeds running through Google Reader, most of which update at least once per day, many of them even more often (multiple times per hour in several cases). I have a colossal stream of information that basically washes through my head and leaves little in terms of apparent traces. Thinking on it now, I wonder if perhaps what is happening is not unlike the course of a river digging out a canyon. Perhaps the types of information I ingest are forming pathways that will then make me more likely to seek out more articles on similar topics. In short, I wonder how much of our future experience and tastes is formed subconsciously based upon our activities here and now and how difficult it is to change these habits once they’ve been formed.