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This is one of those topics that makes me wish I could take a peek at all of the other answers before publishing my own! Will most folks choose serious or frivolous answers, I wonder?
I’m going to bend the rules slightly and give two answers this week so that I won’t be out of place for giving a serious answer while everyone else bemoans the loss of their favourite snacks from decades past or for giving a lighthearted reply while everyone else soberly talks about recently extinct species of animals or something.
My Serious Answer: Winter
Winter was better when I was a kid because it was colder and snowier. This meant that there was more water to fill our aquifers when spring came and that fewer harmful species like ticks survived the deep freezes of that season.
Last winter was worryingly mild and dry in Ontario. We received less than half the usual amount of snow and some veterinarians here are now recommending that pet owners give their dogs tick medication year-round because they were still finding ticks on dogs in late December when the ground should have been far too frozen for any of those creatures to be crawling around, much less being alert enough to bite.
Climate change is here, and it’s rapidly affecting everything in our environment.
My Lighthearted Answer: Message Boards
I remember a time when there were active forums and message boards everywhere online for any topic you could imagine and probably many more for subjects you’d never think would have such numerous or devoted fans. Sometimes a thread would be started about a specific question and it would sit dormant for weeks or months until someone with the right knowledge discovered it, bumped it to the top, and answered it.
Social media is useful for a lot of other things, but it usually does not inspire deep conversations on niche interests that unfold over many years or reward people who are experts in their fields and genuinely know what they’re talking about.
I desperately miss having access to all of that knowledge and having the opportunity to add to it when I could.
If only we could experience both of these things thriving in 2024: social media for what is predominantly lighthearted, surface-level conversations and forums for people who want to dig deeply into a specific topic and either share their knowledge of it or become well-versed in it themselves.
Here is a quick snapshot into the funny sorts of things I look up online.
Here are some of the amusing things I’ve googled thanks to books. I sadly only remember the name and titles of a few of the books that prompted my searches, but I’ll edit this post if I can think of more of them.
I love this topic! Here are some things I’ve recently googled and why I looked them up online.
Leigh Alexander’s “