Next Stop, Says Mr. G: YouTube
by Keith Gatling | 4 years ago
A few weeks ago, in my post about some cabin fever relievers, I talked about the many podcasts you could listen to while you’re remaining socially distant from the rest of humanity. There are quite a few that we like to listen to in our family, and we listen to them when we’re in the car together...and especially on long road trips. In fact, we save them up just
for that.
Obviously, we haven’t been anywhere in a while. Two long road trips that would’ve given us the opportunity to listen to a lot of them have been postponed for the duration, and since we’re not even leaving the house to go to church right now (our services are being live
streamed), we don’t even get to listen to Lexicon Valley on the way to and from.
And quite frankly, the idea of just sitting on the bed (because who leaves their bedroom these days) listening to a 45-minute podcast sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. For some reason, for me it’s different when I’m in a car, on a bus, or in a box with a fox. It’s something to do while I’m stuck there for hours.
But then there’s YouTube.
And the thing about YouTube, like a lot of the rest of the internet, is that you go there looking for one thing, and you end up going down the rabbit hole of things that it also linked to, and that you now have to check out (yes, Wikipedia, I’m talking about you).
Sometimes we call this effect serendipity.
In library school, it was explained to us as what happens when you’re browsing the shelves for the book you came in for, and suddenly see three more that you just have to take out.
But getting back to YouTube, I forget what it was that I was really looking for at the time, but in doing so, I serendipitously (there’s that word again) found a link to a short video about how houses in the U.S. are different from the ones in the U.K. It was by a guy named Laurence Brown, an expat Brit who now lives in Chicago; and it turns out that he has a YouTube series and channel called Lost in the Pond. I was hooked after the first one.
The videos are very entertaining and informative, and not a bad way to spend 15 minutes at a time. He’s got over 400 of them to date, which I believe is more than enough to get me through the quarantine.
YoU should check them out. And who knows...maybe while looking at them, you’ll serendipitously stumble across something else!
