Session Three

For the record, I hate writing prompts. Anxiety, what a lousy lover! Though great for the occasional adrenaline rush :-) Anyway, here we are--

Sometimes our best work comes out of the serendipitous and unexpected; surprising, obscure facts and histories become the starting points for passionate writing, and add, in increments, to the knowledge that we each carry with us in order share with others, and to learn more about ourselves. We write about what we know, but what we know should grow by strange leaps and curious bounds, especially since we live in an age where information is almost always at our fingertips.

Wikipedia has a random article function that, when clicked, brings you to (unsurprisingly) a randomly selected article within the Wiki universe. Click this link at least ten times, so that you end up with at least ten articles. From these ten articles, you will choose at least five articles, all of which will be incorporated into your piece for the week. If you choose to click more than ten times, please select at least half the number of articles you end up viewing. So: If you view 10 articles, choose at least 5; for 20, choose at least 10; et cetera.

The topics you discover can be elaborated upon, or they can be mentioned very briefly. But please use at least 5 of 10.

The random article link has been provided for your use of ease (and once you are in the Wikiverse, it appears in the column on the lefthand side of every page):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

So, example: I just did five random clicks, and turned up
Tammy Parks (a former Penthouse centerfold turned porn star)
Columbia College in Sonora, California
Nanaimo-North Cowichan (a provincial electoral district in Canada)
Eric Harland (a New Zealand politician)
Windows NT Startup process (the process by which Windows systems initialize)

Billy attends Columbia College, and to avoid writing his paper about the contested validity of Nanaimo-North Cowichan as an electoral district, he decides to watch some of Tammy Parks' adult movies online. However, his computer is not virus-safe, and so in the midst of watching "Strap On Sally 8" the viruses from the dirty site take hold and shut off his PC. He is forced to repeatedly endure the Windows NT Startup process until he can't take it anymore and he has to go to get his computer fixed. One of the tech guys is a New Zealander and is reading a book about Eric Harland; when asked about the origins of the virus, Billy is embarrassed, and cannot take Eric Harland's smiling face staring out at him from the book cover, ever judging. He mumbles something about writing a paper about Tammy Baker and clicking a bad link. The tech guys know better. Oh well.

See? Have fun!