Wednesday, November 29, 2006

two apocalypses within five seconds

At 5:00pm today, I was looking at Mark Pesce's del.icio.us page (http://del.icio.us/mpesce), having followed the link to it from his professional blog (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/). I was looking at the list of tags in the right-hand column of http://del.icio.us/mpesce. My attention focused on "apocalypse", I put my mouse pointer over that link, I was trying to summon into consciousness the word "eschaton" because I was going to check out that link too. After about 5 seconds of trying to remember the word "eschaton", the guy in the cubicle facing mine walked in from outside and said:
"it's upon us, man. the horsemen are rolling", referring to the cold front and large clouds quickly rolling into town after a fairly warm morning and afternoon.

  • I hadn't really put very much effort into remembering the word "eschaton" (a word which crosses my mind so often that it probably wouldn't have taken me very long to recall it if I had really tried) but I was reminded of it when I followed the "apocalypse" link, because Mark Pesce had tagged the same page with both "apocalypse" and "eschaton".
  • In another Firefox tab I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us), having gotten interested in the folksonomic structure of del.icio.us as I read about it in Mark Pesce's blog.
  • Yesterday I was looking at the website for a PBS Frontline episode called "Apocalypse!" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/).