Wednesday
Three down and two to go. More site-to-site hopscotch today. Surprise. Even so, the day passed quickly. We started listening to Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Congratulations to the U.S. World Cup Soccer Team for their 3 – 2 victory over Portugal.

NPR/PRI Programming

  • Talk of the Nation spent the second hour talking about the phenomenon (do do do-do-do….) that is eBay. They talked about its history and what makes it so popular, among other things. One item of interest: The story about the man who created eBay to help sell his girlfriend’s collection of Pez® dispensers…. It never happened. That’s right, it’s a made-up story. A fabrication. Spin. Marketing. But, it did exactly what a good marketing campaign/ploy should do: It created a concept that stuck in peoples’ heads.

    Neil Conan bid on his first-ever eBay auction during the show. He won the auction, too! What did he win? 25 issues of the Marvel comic X-Factor. It seems that Mr. Conan is something of a comic book fan. In fact, he has even ‘appeared’ in issues of Fantastic Four and Uncanny X-Men; I own some of the issues in which he, or rather his likeness, appears.

    Another “Gee Whiz” note about eBay: Their eBay Motors division (used car sales) does $1 billion of business per year! One. Billion. Dollars. That fact, alone, is impressive. The fact that they do that with a staff of only five (5) people makes it even more impressive.

Quote of the Day: Today’s QotD is an excerpt from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency…

The electric monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes, thus saving you the trouble of washing them yourself. Video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you from looking at it yourself. Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you , thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task – that of believing all the things that the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately, this electric monk had developed a fault and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.

And now, goodnight.

Peace.