The Boiled Egg of Infinity

…or, from the stars to the stars, via bollocks.

The web is a bad place for casual reading, especially if you have (like me) an overactive sense of curiosity. Often if I’m reading something and there’s a link, I click and follow it and never manage to finish reading what I was on in the first place. Then I click on another link. Click click, clickety click and I’m suddenly ten articles over to the right of where I started. In my experience Wikipedia is especially bad for this, and my reading yesterday serves as a perfect example.

It all started off with someone in my office asking something about Aquarius. Stuck with a boring task and looking for something to take my mind off it for five minutes in my break, I quickly popped over to the Wiki and looked it up. Click.

While reading through this, I thought “Why not check on the constellation I was born under?” So I go through the article and find a link to the constellation Capricornus. Click.

As I read about Capricornus I found out it is also known as Amalthea in Greek Mythology. The paragraph dealing with this also mentioned Cronos, the father of Zeus. Not knowing Zeus had a father I thought I would see what that was all about. Click.

Cronos castrated his father? Wow. I thought I had it bad not having much in common with my dad. Might not like the same things as he does but I’ve never gone after his twig and berries with a pair of pinking shears. Hmmm. I wonder what history there is to castration? Click.

Okay, in the thick of it now (literally). Actually turns out to be quite fascinating, I had no idea the practice went back so far or that it had such an interesting history. And practiced up to the present day? Okay so maybe I didn’t need to see the picture of a guy holding a horse testicle in his hand (that ketamine better be good stuff) but we live and we learn. While I’m working through this one and trying not to cross my legs, my eyes happen across a mention of a Marshall Applewhite. That name rings a bell. Click.

Turns out I have heard the name before and a bell was rightly rung. Applewhite was part of the Heaven’s Gate Cult, a movement that believed a spaceship was hiding behind a comet and would take them all to the stars. That, and ritual suicide. This mob were mentioned in a book I read recently called “The Men Who Stare At Goats”. I couldn’t remember what the cult believed beyond the whole comet thing. Click.

Oookay.

So, for those of you keeping score I started off at Aquarius, went through Capricorn, sidestepped through Cronus and Greek myth, passed through the joys of castration, chanced upon Marshall Applewhite and ended up reading about the Heaven’s Gate Cult, with a brief stop at the horse testicle photo. From one constellation to a crowd of people who believed they were about to get a closer view of the stars. Almost full circle. This is why I love the internet, but also why I think it needs a more disciplined mind than my own to use it for any kind of research.