Mixed Recall

One of the marvels of modern technology is the Internet and our instant ability to access information as almost everything is available. I say almost as some searches come back empty like trying to find your cars keys or where you laid your wallet. My memory works like one of the motorcycles sitting in our the garage, if it has been sitting there unused you must keep kicking it until it fires over, it will pop and sputter, but with more kicking and fresh fuel it will fire up and run smoothly. When my memory fetches to a requested address it often brings back several mailboxes. When I learned to program for the computer we had a set of toggle switches to load the data and a set of toggles for the address where the data was stored. The panel was silk screened in different colors to show how the instructions code were divided in different operations. My calculus instructor in college labeled the core memory address a post office box when he drew on the blackboard and that analogy stuck.



An example of my convoluted memory's schematic is when I hear of the food riots in Africa this week I also hear the music of Tom Dooley. If you were around in 1958 and listening to the radio you would have heard the song Tom Dooley. If you had just purchased a stereo and have moved up from hi-fi you would be buying long playing (LPs) records. I owned several Kingston Trio Albums. Memory works great if you encode the information then repeat the repetition at different intervals many times. For me listening to the few albums I had over and over resulted in this convoluted connection. One of my records had a song recorded live by the Trio. It was the Merry Minuet, lyrics as follows:


They're rioting in Africa,

They're starving in Spain.

There's hurricanes in Florida,

And Texas needs rain

The whole world is festering

With unhappy souls.

The French hate the Germans,

The Germans hate the Poles;

Italians hate Yugoslavs,

South Africans hate the Dutch,

And I don't like anybody very much!

But we can be tranquil

And thankfill and proud,

For man's been endowed

With a mushroom-shaped cloud.

And we know for certain

That some lovely day

Someone will set the spark off,

And we will all be blown away!

They're rioting in Africa,

There's strife in Iran

.What nature doesn't do to us

Will be done by our fellow man!


Maybe my explanation helps in explaining my weirdness
Some people say the problem is hardwired
I thinks it is a bug in my software