Post Journal Snatch: Topic Drift
Created | Updated Mar 6, 2016
Topic Drift. Our favourite topic.
Topic Drift
It started with Belgium
One day, Gnomon started his journal like this:
I'm off to Brussels tomorrow for the weekend to see my brother and his wife. They've lived there for about 40 years now. No great plans for what I'll do while I'm there other than chat and drink some Belgian beer.
They live just across the road from the Stoclet Palace, a mansion built for an Austrian banker.
This looks interesting, but is not open to the public. It's owned by members of the Stoclet family who can't agree on what to do with it so it is just sitting there, empty. It's got lots of very fascist-looking bronze nude statues on it.
As you can imagine, the subject didn't stay on the Brussels trip very long. The next post was this:
Icy North:Enjoy the beer!
So, what is it about a bronze nude statue which makes it fascist? Is it the salute?
After establishing what makes a statue fascist, the conversation went on to beer, waffles, the film 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World', the correct pronunciation of Ypres, more beer talk, why Douglas Adams used 'Belgium' as a swear word, the beauty of the Ardennes…
At some point, somebody objected to all this subject-changing. Whereupon I said:
Isn't that what journals are for, to take over and change the subject? Nobody's ever done anything else on MY journal...
And Icy replied:
You just reminded me that we haven't played the Topic Drift game for a while. A journal posting will follow...
Topic Drift
Icy's first post:
h2g2 conversations are renowned for their propensity to drift off topic. We as a community recognise that maybe our initial postings are often about the wrong subject altogether, and we appreciate the efforts of our correspondents to put us straight in these matters.
Usually.
But can we sustain a conversation in which *every single post* not only acknowledges the previous posting, but sets it off in a completely different direction? With your help, I aim to find out.
I'll start this thread by asking whether anyone watched the first episode of John Le Carre's 'The Night Manager' on BBC TV last Sunday. I thought it was a great attempt at dramatising one of his best books. The acting was first class.
Here come the next few posts:
Paulh: My niece has me worried: she keeps painting pictures of ferns wearing galoshes.
Baron Grim: I didn't watch it because I'm in the states and we have to settle for BBCAmerica, which, like most nights, was airing reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
BBCAmerica does run the occasional British series, like tonight, they're starting the series Prey, but mostly it's ST:TNG, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares or reruns of Top Gear. Oh, and the movie on sunday night will be The Fifth Element.
It now seems that as long as there's a British accent, that's good enough.
Dmitri: Last night, we started watching 'John Adams, the miniseries' on Amazon Prime. Tom Wilkinson makes the best Ben Franklin I ever saw. Yay, Brits!
Paulh: I was partial to Howard Da Silva's Ben Franklin in the 1972 film "1776."
Bluebottle: The best man at my wedding was called Ben Franklin.
Galaxy Babe: I am currently learning all the US Presidents, in order. Christian names, family names and initials and what they stand for. Franklin is mentioned in approx. 40 places in the USA so he must have been a big
Consider that train of thought derailed. And notice: three participants are Guide Editors who have no shame at all.
h2g2: We're brilliant conversationalists. Just…in another universe.
