Brain Crack is Whack

I'd like everyone to take a moment and think about the last time you had a question, about anything, and didn't immediately have an answer. Thanks to the smart phone generation we can access vast information networks anytime we want at the touch of a button and BOOM! the fat guy who died in Star Wars name was Porkins, or BOOM! terminal velocity of a human is 117mph.* 

I recently had a moment where I desperately needed the internet to solve a dumb question for me. Being a child of the 80s there are several fragments of bizarre television shows half-remembered in my brain. This particular one was about a girl who had special powers and an uncle who resembled Newman from Seinfeld.

Newman!

Now, pre-internet, hell, pre-Youtube a thing like this would be hard to track down. I distinctly remember seeing the show only a handful of times. A couple of times when I was a kid, and then years later when I was waiting in line for the King Kong ride at Universal Studios Florida. They had cut snippets of this show into the line video, and being the wait for this particular ride was an hour and a half, I got to see the same clip over and over again. Thinking about that ride brought back memories of the show, and I had an overwhelming need to find out what it was. After five minutes of searching I found this:

"Out of this World" was a syndicated sitcom that ran from 1987 to 1991 and stared a much hotter version of the mom from "Even Stevens".

Then

Now

A guy who turns out looks nothing like Newman.

Newman?

And a child actress who played a little girl who found out she was half-alien and could freeze time by putting her fingers together. It was basically an 80s retelling of "Bewitched", a pre "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" if you will. Oh, and the guy who voiced her never seen alien father?

How you doin'?

 Burt freakin' Reynolds. Overall, it was a cheesy show that brought back some fun nostalgia, but the rediscovery of this show isn't what I wanted to focus on. 

The ease of finding it was kind of disturbing. I remember when I was in college I had a discussion with a dorm-neighbor about a different show. A cartoon that involved a kid who turned into a car depending on if he was hot or not. It took us an hour and talking with three different people before we discovered it was called "Turbo Teen." While it took longer to find I enjoyed the action of searching. It made the nostalgia even stronger and added enjoyment to the discussion. We now live in such a dispassionate age where discovery is so instantaneous it hardly means anything. As such we are always looking for that next factoid. When those cell phone commercials involving people roboticly spouting random facts came out a few years ago I turned to a friend and said, "Yep."

Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers calls this phenomenon brain crack. An obsession that comes with needing to know everything right away. I think we need to break away from that. Next time you want to know something go to the library and take some time looking into it, or talk to people. When you do that preface the discussion by telling them they can't use their smart phone. Work it out together. Involve multiple people. I think the interaction will do us all a world of good.  

*I actually had to search the terminal velocity of a human. Everyone knows who Porkins was.