December 9^th, 2004

It's rare that I get into paroxysms of hysterical laughter and/or giggling, and rarer still when I induce this state by myself. For me, at least, it's a lot like tickling: I just can't seem to do it to myself. But last night, in a moment of teenager-like silliness, I did.

See, I was going through the Windows XP \Windows folder, just poking around and seeing what I could see, when I came across the old pre-Windows-95-style help viewer. I still spend 50% of my professional life involved in documentation, so I figured I would "check it out". Sort of like people who want to take their old leather coat out for a spin--just for the nostalgia of it.

So I opened it, then viewed its own "Help on Help" (a new instance of the program, I noticed ... that's kinda funky). It has changed quite a bit since Windows 3.1 days, so I started doing a text search. Almost stream of consciousness, I typed, "Death heads, floating". For a moment, it looked as though the search had found a relevant topic. Which set me laughing uncontrollably for a couple of minutes ... something about the silliness of what I typed and the context in which I typed it.

I let myself laugh it out for a while, then got very worried: Does this Mean Something? Am I slowly losing my mind? I mean, this sort of thing amused me when I was 12 ... but why should it send me into such a state now? Hmm ...

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