Unknown unknowns – are they worth knowing?

I was just going through my newsfeeds in Google Reader – which I periodically do – to prune them back to a manageable firehose of continuously new information.  I’m subscribed to what I can only describe as a disturbing number of feeds, and from time to time this becomes problematic, as I possess neither the time to read and digest all of this information, nor the memory capacity to draw upon these nuggets of data afterwards.  Indeed, I’m starting to wonder whether shoving all of this stuff into my eyeballs is having detrimental effect on my conversational ability (many people would claim that in fact no, it hasn’t gotten any worse than it already was).  Many’s the time I’ll pipe up to an interlocutor with the line, “Hey!  I read this story the other day… and there were these people… and they were doing… something…”.  Aggregate level of human awareness remains static, other than the awareness that yes, I am losing my grip.

ANYWAY the point was that the Internet is a wondrous place for the curious, and the chief culprit of my lost hours due to trying to sponge up information with the tattered grey matter I haven’t yet killed with alcohol is of course wikipedia.  Without launching into a rehash of the endlessly swirling rhetoric regarding wikipedia’s accuracy, it still makes me smile that amid all that other knowledge that mankind has seen fit to deposit there, someone’s taken the time out to write articles on those treasured forms of visual communication, The Finger and the much maligned greeting technique, mooning (more popularly know in Australia as “chucking a browneye”).

But that’s not the reason I wrote this post – somehow via one of the websites that I read I discovered that actor Dan Aykroyd has recently posted an online video promoting a new vodka which he’s had a hand in the genesis of.  The distinctive features being that the vodka is quadruple-distilled, and come in a skull-shaped bottle.  The infomercial is pretty dry, and apparently this has set off all kinds of speculation about whether it’s a “viral” for the freshly mooted Ghostbusters 3 film, or perhaps for the DVD release of the most recent (failed and insulting) attempt at an Indiana Jones film.

Turns out that the answer is, in fact, that they’re releasing a new premium vodka in a “crystal” head-shaped bottle.  Pretty much as the video suggests.  I was wondering why in the hell Aykroyd was involved – it’s widely known that he’s always had an interest in the supernatural, and it turns out that he also has his own winery!  That makes vodka a bit less unlikely.

But if you watch the video through to the end I think the reasoning’s pretty clear – Aykroyd’s the only famous man alive who could get out a phrase like “triple herkimer diamond filtered newfoundland deep aquifer pure spirit vodka” without cocking it up, or without then going on to talk about “reconfiguring the main deflector dish to emit some sort of inverse tachyon pulse… MMMMMBWAHEY!”.

The only reason I mention it is because by the middle of next week I’ll probably have no recollection of ever having blogged this.
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