Fact-checking for the Book sent me in some strange directions the other day. For starters, I had written that a character was "built like a .22 slug," by which I meant to indicate, short, squat, and solid. It occurred to me, however, that I had never seen a .22 slug, and preliminary Internet research had me questioning whether there really was such a thing.
At any rate, there followed a good half hour's excavation of the World Wide Web's gun culture — with Google as my
Vergilian tour guide of this Internet hell — in a fruitless search for a .jpeg of the elusive .22 slug before I finally gave up trying and moved on.
I got stuck again about an hour later, as I came across a passage in the last chapter in which a sports talk radio personality complains about the performance of former Cleveland Indians second baseman, Carlos Baerga. The date of this outburst is June 19, 1996, and for the sake of historical accuracy I was determined to find out Baerga's batting average for the Tribe as of that date. The logical source for such an inquiry would be the Society for American Baseball Research. Of course, when I typed in the
"sabr.com" URL I was directed to a site maintained by "The Sabr Foundation," a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting the interests of Islam. A blurb in the corner of the Sabr site redirects baseball fans to
"sabr.org."
Given the current political climate, anyone monitoring my IP address will be alarmed, no doubt, by the apparent nexus of interests — ammo and Islam — that these hapless online forays suggest. And whether or not the FBI took sufficient notice of my Net travels to open a file on me, I feel I must extend the sincerest of apologies to The Sabr Foundation, a group that seems innocent enough in its mission but could well see its assets frozen by the end of the week — all because some wacko named Phutatorius landed hard on its website after browsing online guns & ammo emporia.
I can only speculate as to how feds are synthesizing the inquiries I put to Jeeves earlier in the morning —
e.g., (1) whether
Gila monsters have eyelids, and (2) what was the
seating capacity of a 1988 Chevelle — into their profile of me. But honestly, folks, I was fact-checking the Book in every instance. The whole thing is just a misunderstanding.
So right now I don't want to hear about how hard the Soviets made it for Solzhenitsyn.
