New Antipasto entry: Heavy diet.
Another one of those random thoughts occurred to me today ...
It began when Leon pasted me a short joke over IM:
A lady opened her refrigerator and saw a rabbit sitting on one of the shelves.
"What are you doing in there?" she asked.
The rabbit replied: "This is a Westinghouse, isn't it?" to which the lady replied,
"Yes."
"Well," the rabbit said, "I'm westing."
I found it rather funny at the time, but then it occurred to me that I haven't actually seen this joke before, which is a rare occurrence in itself. After you've been online for a little while, you expect to have seen every joke at least a couple of times. Maybe this was embedded in one of the mails from certain people that I used to just filter out to /dev/null ...
Anyway. So I looked up "Westinghouse rabbit" on Google, and the joke was found on around 10 websites, maybe more. So where did this joke came from? A book someone wrote? We can obviously restrict the possible time frame to after the fridge had been invented, and well, after whenever Westinghouse started building fridges. And why a rabbit?
If you looked at the Google results, the joke remained mostly intact. Once upon a time, stories and folk tales were passed from generation to generation by means of song or speech, before writing systems were devised, before printing systems. I can't remember where I read this bit of detail (hah!), but the idea is that your traditional bard didn't actually memorise songs; instead he remembered the plot and the shape of sounds - when you have rhymes, for example, you restrict the number of possible words which form the song - so he just made the song up within the given bounds, dramatising a certain aspect or two, if it pleased him. Hence songs and stories had plenty of room to evolve.
These days, we have electronic "copy and paste". Does this mean then, that because everything is so easily reproducible without too much margin for error, that, in effect, we have more of a constancy in preserving songs, stories, myths and so forth, in their original presentation?
I'd often thought that the convenience of technology means we don't use our memory as well as we humanly can. And while it allows room for new forms of art and expression, I'm now wondering if it also limits our imagination to be innovative with old material to a certain extent.