Memories, Search Engines, and Bar Cortona
This week, I decided to try something different, which brings me to the pleasant atmosphere of one of Sydney's best kept secrets, Bar Cortona in Homebush. We all have places of familiarity we visit when we meet friends i.e. a particular bar, a landmark, a movie theatre, or perhaps for those socially awkward types - a web forum. However, Cortona is a place that lends itself to circumstances which we're probably all finding more and more scarce - spending time alone without the ever lingering thought of work, entertaining company, outstanding tasks, seething rage about the constantly broken down ticket machines at Sydney train stations, and so forth.
Sitting on the neither small nor medium sized chairs, surrounded by the calming beige/orange pastels of the walls and the endearing, handmade jewellery and assorted home decorations - seashell photo frames, glass-blown cookie jars, a rooster carved from wood (I'm not sure who would buy that, but it works in here) - one can sit with a coffee, looking out the window on a Sydney winter which can typically include sun, rain and overcast within an hour, and think there is still a place to find a respite from living vicariously through Google and the Internet (where most of our social interactions are being recorded nowadays - or does this post now take that away as well?). The only gripe I have about this hallowed sanctuary is that the leisurely atmosphere seems to incite some form of juvenile Alzheimer’s among the new staff there.
The new guy at Cortona, a young scraggly looking kid (hair tossed about, face half-shaven, all in a prepared manner), always forgets my order. This is particularly irritating after the first 6 times, considering I've been going there for 4 years, and that my order is extremely simple (no soy-latte half sugar easy-on-the-froth with a spoon of cinnamon extra hot, or anything like that). Now these are not unrealistic expectations, when I say he forgets my order, I mean consistently only 5-10 mins after ordering he'll ask me, all uncertain tone, eyebrows tilted with an upward inflection at the end of the sentence 'What did you order again?'. Perhaps it's the puberty setting in, I know it's tough to think of anything other than girls at that age...maybe Neil Strauss can help.
After his most recent bout of memory lapse, I told him half-jokingly 'dude, you always forget my order', to which he replied 'I always get you confused with another guy that comes here, Pete...do you know Pete?’ The 'do you know Pete' bit was a weak lead to divert the conversation and perhaps provide him with some sort of excuse. I didn't know Pete, what's his last name? Pan, Sampras, Townshend, Wentz, Doherty? For all I know he could be the imaginary friend scraggly hair is giving my coffee to, while he forgets the real people sitting in the place. Imagination has a way of becoming hyperbolic when expectations aren't met, so I had this image in my head of a public announcement of scraggly hair announcing, Clinton-style 'I did not forget...that man's order'.
I'm not sure if there is a simple way to rectify this problem, and I doubt even Stephen Wolfram has the answer to that. I even asked the question to his brilliant new search website Wolfram Alpha. Although I couldn't find answers to complex human problems, before I knew it I was searching facts and figures of everything else, loving the idea of being able to 'compute' Michael Jordan's age to the day, and a moment later discovering the economic toll being wrought by Australia’s ageing population - as a percentage of GDP. With a single search entry, Wolfram produces a page of statistics, summaries and information as far as one is compelled to drill down into, needless to say it's a huge (and perhaps natural) step our conception of information search.
In his mesmerising novel The Shadow of the Wind Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón describes the (fictional) 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books', a place containing all the books ever written, and the souls of their respective authors (seemingly a high-culture version of the Alice in Wonderland Library managed by Sir Cheshire Cat). It is not too inconceivable, with Wolfram Alpha, Google, Wikipedia, and perhaps Bing as repositories of all human knowledge attained over thousands of years, that 'real' books (as knowledge stores) will be confined to a lost cemetery, the top level perhaps becoming a popular place for university students to 'meet' - a combination of cemetery, shrine, nostalgia and the hormone-sharing taking place in today’s local libraries.
When we need an answer, we find search engines - whether this eventually helps us get an answer or leaves us more confused by choice is another question - which requires a search engine. Instantaneous access to so much knowledge - known as 'search overload' in industry parlance - will also have an interesting effect on our memories when we Gen-Y'ers reach older, riper ages (perhaps 100 will be the new 80 with increasing life expectancy). With so many answers available at the click of a button, what's the point of actually 'remembering' everything? Perhaps my answer to the scraggly kid dilemma is to post my order up on a website, with my name, throw in some metadata so it shows up early in search results, so he can type in 'what was his order - the guy that reminds me of Pete' and will come up with....my order! Sounds like a solution I will have to try out...but how am I going to remember it?
Now for some light entertainment, here's something I won't forget (for a week, at least).I'm sure you've all seen it, but you can't possibly get tired of seeing something superhuman like this. King James is 24 months, 5 days old today (thanks Wolfram).
