[PoeticSilence]

I was talking to my little twelve year old penpal on AIM a little bit ago, he's in sixth grade and has to name a hundred and fifteen elements on the periodic table. I was thinking what an idiotic thing to have someone do, they KNOW he will have to look it all up on the internet and then write it all down, but he bloody well won't remember it. I was telling him when I was a kid, we didn't have the internet, but my parents had encyclopedias. Then I got to realizing how I loved those things and read them like books. When I was in my early twenties I agonized over buying a set so my kids would have some but financially it was out of my reach. It turns out when they got to the ages of needing them, they had internet. I felt badly briefly about them never knowing the joy of just reading through the encyclopedias and see the pictures, but then I just smiled at how things turned out and how so many people have so much information they can tap into so easily.