Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat

It's pathetic. I'm hopelessly addicted to both YouTube and Wikipedia and everytime I wonder about something, I have to look it up on Wikipedia first, and then see if there are any YouTube videos about it. If I don't resort to YouTube, it's only because the Wikipedia search has led to me click on links and read about related topics until dawn. Last night I had a dream about Ina Garten, who is the host of the Barefoot Contessa, a cooking show in the Food Network. She was the 'page of the day' on Wikipedia yesterday. So last night I dreamt that I met her at a wealthy friends' house and that she was cooking dinner for the whole family (in France!?). I told her I love her show (which I've seen about twice) and she asked me where I was from and what time the show came on in Atlanta. I lied and said about 3:30 pm or so. Then I told her that I "love to just turn it on and watch you add shallots to a salad." Right after I said that, I realized that shallots do not go in salads and felt very stupid about having made a culinary blunder like that. Soups would have been ok, but salads, no way. Maybe my dream director thought the alliteration was fitting, but I remember being embarassed for the rest of the dream. Shallots in salads - what was I thinking? Anyway, I'm happy to report that the Ina Garten in my dream was very sweet and gracious. She was cooking dinner for my dream friends even though she is probably busy with a cooking show, cookbooks, and two popular restaurants. Yesterday I got on Wikipedia to look up "Inside Man," a thriller directed by Spike Lee of all people, and that led to reading all about Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster, Malcolm X, the Tuskegee Syphillis Study, congenital syphillis, the etymology of the word, the debate on its origin, as well as an extensive list of famous people who may have had syphillis. Fascinating, but a hell of a tangent. Among those who are suspected of having syphillis are:

Ivan the Terrible, Queen Elizabeth, Mozart, Charles Darwin, Robert Schumann, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stalin, Hitler, Howard Hughes, and that is just the cream of the crop.

Incidentally, the film Barefoot Contessa is currently playing at the VO movie theater in Dijon, VO being French for voix original, non-dubbed version.