Hurrah for Friday night, and some more QI. When you’ve reached the final hurdle of the end of the week, it’s nice to sit down and have some reliably (very) funny oddities of the world to learn about, and laugh about.
QI appeals for those moments when you just need a little bit of unusual (or at time, downright incomprehensible) information. Thing is, I think my need for this is higher than most.
This could be why I continue to like reading columnists whose virtue is spotting things happening in the world, and commenting on them. It’s a bit of a goldfish mentality, probably, the “ooh what’s that?” followed by “that’s interesting” followed by “ooh what’s that?” etc.
The thing is, I planned to start this by telling you about a series of options on YouTube, whereby you can see sequences of the different sounds for the buzzers on QI (hence “Alan goes…”, as Alan’s buzzer is usually rigged for laughs). It’s probably no worse than much of what’s on YouTube, and certainly better than much. But it certainly fulfils the “ooh what’s that?” objective.
It does tie in to our shorter attention scans, these days. When Andy Warhol coined the phrase of “fifteen minutes of fame“, he wasn’t far off our current patterns, I suspect. 15 minutes is enough to see a bit of a YouTube post, look for the other variants, think you’ve learned something or seen something in full, and go off after something else.
The thing is, I can be fairly happy with a whole series of short inputs of information. It’s why I like short stories, newspaper articles, poems even. But at times, I worry that this butterfly mentality may mean I spend all my time giving you a smorgasbord of enticing, but short lived options, rather than knuckling down and giving some topics some serious attention. Even some editing eh?
Anyway, you can be sure that a Guiness Book of Records will go down well for Christmas…