I’ll be the first to admit that I spend a lot of time on my cell phone searching for tidbits of news and information about something I come across every day.
It could be a song lyric search in the hopes of finding out the artist or band who made the music and what album it’s on along with a slew of other semi-useless factoids.
I’ve also looked for familiar actors in a film to see what other flick I know them from.
And don’t get me started on the long list of recipes I’ve looked up for mom, too!
Google is just the tip of the iceberg known as the Internet – for me at least.
Or, maybe down the rabbit hole might be more appropriate.
Either way, some of that random information sticks in my brain for whatever reason and will sometimes resurface later on down the road.
I find that a lot of it is just rubbish and useless in most normal day-to-day conversation.
But, it certainly helps me during trivia games, so, maybe it’s good for something?
After attending last week’s Matagorda County Soil & Water Conservation District’s “Field & Farm Symposium,” I now have random morsels of information stuck in my brain that aren’t really applicable to anything I do.
I mean, the closest I get to farms and fields are helping mom with her chickens and gardening.
The facts I’ve retained have nothing to do with those topics, but seem to be cherry-picked from the overall overload of information I got at the symposium.
I heard that ticks are one of the most problem insects that cattle, goats and other livestock have to deal with since they spread the most diseases.
And my random brain reminded me that possums were the best natural solution to ticks since they don’t contract rabies.
So, why not give every herd a few possum buddies to coexist with?
Possums eat ticks and thus keep less livestock from being affected – and it sounds easy enough.
But, then I remembered that possums were largely nocturnal and in hindsight harder to manage.
Still, it sounds like a relatively cool and interesting way to combat a pest problem.
Then again, maybe that’s just my take.
Unfortunately, sometimes I learn things that I had absolutely no interest in knowing and find the facts retained as more of an intrusive sort of thought.
When that happens, I try to drown those facts out with other ones that I find more interesting or useful.
Even then it takes a few days of actively absorbing and filing new information away while hoping that it overwrites the old stuff.
Sort of like when we used to burn CDs full of music.
Sometimes, when I liked a certain album less than a new one, I’d just write over it with the new music.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same premise in the human brain, too.
Sometimes, there’s memories or facts that are just so ingrained that they don’t seem to be fading out any time soon.
For all that we were taught “Stop, Drop & Roll’ in case you were on fire in school, I’ve thankfully never had to use it.
Still, it’s in there, stuck in my brain since I can first recall the safety advice – somewhere in the third grade.
