Yesterday was a foggy morning. That fact prompted a couple of questions from my children. They have reached the age where they are curious about the world. It is a very good thing but I don’t know how to answer a lot of their questions. As we drove through the fog they had lots of questions about the fog. The first was what is fog. The answer to which caused them to ask can fog rain. To which I replied that we’d have to look it up.
We have yet to look it up, but the answer worked to stop that flow of questions until they asked if fog can freeze. Which I also told them we’d have to look up. These series of questions made me wish we lived next-door to a library so looking things up would be easier. My wife then reminded me that we live in the age of the internet and can look up anything at anytime wherever we are, but I think a library would be more fun.
There is something pure about book research. About having to walk into a library find books on fog and find the answer to those questions. Even right now, writing this, I am reluctant to look up the answers. They feel like questions that should be asked of a book. That is where the answer should come from.
The internet lacks the filters that books have. Books have to be researched and edited on their own. There are checks and balances. As proof of you reading this they let any idiot have a blog on the internet. I could write right here and right now that of course fog can rain it is a cloud and isn’t it obvious that fog can freeze it is made of water molecules, but I don’t know that, and I hope you know I don’t know that.
There are people very good at passing off what they don’t know as real knowledge on this here internet. There is no one stopping me from typing whatever I want. I could make a David’s Discount Weather blog tonight and post weather reports and facts about meteorology and maybe even a few people would fall for it. I’d just have to learn to write in a manner that sounds smart but says nothing but BS. There are a lot of people skilled in that.
If we could just get to the library or make a list of questions to ask at the library. That’s the thing. A kids question journal. I like that answer and I think that’s going to become a part of my parenting. We’ll create and save questions for the library.
David Huzzard Writes 