You Say You No Surf? Ha. I Make Surf.

I mentioned yesterday how nobody "surfs" the internet anymore... just clicking on some link that seems intriguing, and then following it (and the knowledge, enjoyment, or experience it provides) through some additional link, and on and on and on.

Wikipedia is like that for me. I'll read about one subject... and then I'll have to open up all of the links inside that subject... and then all the interesting links inside those subjects... and on and on and on. (I've still got Wikipedia links stored in my "Favorites" bar that I haven't gotten around to reading yet after I looked up "William Rufus" and ran out of time and energy after 6 hours of "surfing".)

Providentially, Andrew Sullivan has discovered a big bag of Wikipedia crack cocaine: A collection of 50 interesting Wikipedia entries.

Copybot compiles 50 interesting entries. Here's the one for Parsley Massacre:

In October 1937, Dominican President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina ordered the execution of the Haitian population living within the borderlands with Haiti. The violence resulted in the killing of 20,000 to 30,000 Haitian civilians over a span of approximately five days, which would later become known as the Parsley Massacre due to the shibboleth which Trujillo had his soldiers apply to determine whether or not those living on the border were native Dominicans who spoke Spanish fluently. Soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley, ask "What is this?", and assume that those who could not pronounce the Spanish word perejil (called pèsi in Haitian Creole, persil in French) were Haitian. Within the Dominican Republic itself, the massacre is known as El Corte ("the cutting").

There are 49 more entries here. Don't click if you have a low resistance to internet sciolistic varia; you'll lose a day over it.