With every onslaught of midterms comes an equally important set of time-wasters. Perusing Facebook is the old standby, but last year FailBlog and Sporcle became popular. This semester, Farmville has caught on and Facebook will soon have more cows than human users. The most recent development (to my procrastinating arsenal anyway) is StumbleUpon.com. In fact, I can credit the website for my rushed writing and uninteresting column.
For those of you unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, allow me to explain.
StumbleUpon basically turns the Internet into a giant iTunes playlist and lets you hit shuffle. The good news is: none of the songs from your Click Five binge in middle school come up. Only the bizarrely interesting. You can filter the shuffle based on category of interest or whatever mood you are in. I admit it can be hit or miss. But so can Facebook (far too many people have learned to block their pictures).
If I haven’t convinced you to at least give it a test run, maybe a few highlights of where I stumbled this week will help.
Environment Stumble:
What would happen to the Earth if people all of a sudden disappeared? Within two days, the New York subway would flood, finally eliminating all Yankees fans (they aren’t people) and within one year all human head-lice would go extinct (that, surprisingly, has nothing to do with Yankees fans). After 100 years, raccoons, weasels, and foxes would be endangered thanks to competition from your trained killer of a house cat. Also, in a few hundred thousand years, microbes would evolve to biodegrade plastic. Needless to say, I am no longer recycling.
Alcoholic Drinks Stumble:
I had a lot of interesting stumbles in this category (pardon the pun). I found out that despite telling my friends that I could have 20 drinks in an hour, that amount of alcohol would kill me. Once I am 21, of course.
Self Improvement Stumble:
I learned how to nap through StumbleUpon. I didn’t know that I needed help, but did you know that falling asleep while lying completely flat helps you to fall asleep 50 percent faster? Or that NASA astronauts have been found to perform 34 percent better after a 26-minute nap? OK, so most of it seemed pretty self explanatory, but now are least I can have an excuse for sleeping through my 4 p.m. class.
Travel Stumble:
My family is part Quaker, so naturally I was enticed when I found the top 10 best places to live for escaping world conflict (don’t worry, the Nobel Foundation didn’t contribute). Surprisingly, Canada and Switzerland were not No. 1 and 2. Socialized medicine and small, red knives were a bit much. The Kiwis and Bhutan topped the list. The only problem is, you have to either live in the side of a cliff or with 10 times more sheep than people if you want that type of safety.
If you get bored of listing the same three letter body parts or are tired of showing off your knowledge of the countries in West Africa, check out StumbleUpon. A word of caution, however: I have learned absolutely nothing this week in lecture. Well, that isn’t entirely true. I did learn that I am allodoxaphobic. Thank you, Internet.
—Ryan Sullivan is a junior in Peabody College. He can be reached at ryan.c.sullivan@vanderbilt.edu.
