(Previously published in The Blade.)
A writer will do anything to avoid actually writing - pace, fret, fiddle, golf. In the old days, we'd pass the lonely hours in our basement offices banking reams of crinkled paper wads off the walls into the wastebasket in the corner. But that was before the World Wide Web opened a whole new frontier of distractions.
Nowadays a writer with finely honed word skills, a little time between deadlines and the desire to squander both can fill the void playing Internet Roulette.
Here's how the game works. Just type (fill in the blank).com then sit back and let the wonders of cyberspace parade across your monitor. Once you satisfy your curiosity that fillintheblank.com is indeed an actual web site (as are www.www.com and www.dotcom.com) you are ready to begin some real brainstorming.
Let's say you are engrossed in a research project when it occurs to you that it's been years since you had a Fresca. Simply boot up Internet Explorer, tap in fresca.com and, Poof!, up pops the official web site for the Coca-Cola Company. You will quickly discover that Coke is keeping quiet about the fate of Fresca, but that the web site has several cool games, so the time was well spent.
Locating obscure beverages is just one example of the many uses for the web. In fact, just about any word that pops into your head can lead you down another aisle of the Internet's 24-hour superstore of knowledge. The whole fun of Internet Roulette is that you might end up in the frozen desserts section when you were only looking for canned fish.
For example, cars.com, as you might expect, takes you to an online car-buying service, but car.com is the web site for Carters Little Liver Pills, which generations of kids washed down with Fresca.
At dog.com, you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about canines and order a pekingese soap dispenser for $8.95, but you won't learn a thing about cats at cat.com, home site of heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar.
See? Hours of fun.
(Note to parents: Even innocent words, especially the names of major body parts, can lead to web sites that should only be viewed by people much more mature than you, if you get my drift.)
Recently, thanks to a rather lengthy writing project that I was trying to avoid, I had the opportunity to enter the names of numerous vegetables in my web browser, starting with the bean family.
I discovered that beans.com is a web page belonging to an Internet advertising company, the same company, I later learned, that owns the names refrigerator.com and nose.com.
Soybeans.com is a vegetarian food distributor specializing in "animal replacement parts" (that's fake meat). Stringbean.com was created by some guy to show off pictures of his family and rant about how Microsoft is taking over the world (best viewed with Netscape). Waxbeans.com was still under construction the last time I checked. I'll keep you posted.
Corn.com is the homepage for Capricorn Records, which distributes recordings by bands such as "311" and the "Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies," while carrot.com sells either music, poetry, boat cruises or all of the above. It wasn't really clear.
Potato.com, surprisingly, is not the homepage of Dan Quayle [note to young readers: Dan Quayle was possibly the greatest vice president in American history, except for all the other vice presidents]. No, Potato.com is a site for a non-partisan potato farm. Asparagus.com is the site of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board, whose motto, I swear, is "Spreading the good word about the virtues of asparagus, one of nature's most perfect foods."
Fruit opens another world of possibilities. Apple.com is obviously the home of Apple Computers, but you probably didn't know that orange.com is a software company, tangerine.com is a furniture company and both pear.com and banana.com will forward you to the same travel-oriented home page. Grapes.com is the web site of the Georgia Radio Amateur Packet Enthusiast Society, a group that could probably teach writers a thing or two about wasting time.
Cucumber.com, pickle.com, peas.com and avacado.net are all Internet-related companies, while watermellon.com is an, um, see "note to parents" above.
Of course, the Internet is about more than just produce. It is also about random letters that spell nothing at all. Out of a dozen attempts at entering strings of random letters from three to nine characters each, 10 turned out to be actual web addresses, two of them of the "note to parents" variety.
Internet Roulette has provided me with countless hours of distraction that would not have been possible only a few years ago. My paper-wad free-throw percentage has suffered, but my time-wasted average has improved substantially.
Disclaimer: In fairness to my profession, I should note that not all writers are so undisciplined that they sit around randomly accessing sites on the World Wide Web. Many of them are hard at work at this very moment spreading the word about the virtues of asparagus.