MAY I ASK A STUPID QUESTION?

Tonight I was preparing the sixth day of the running Christmas Card and I have to admit that I was doing a lot of on-going research.  You know what that means...Go ogle the images on Google.  As I was doing that I asked myself for the Nth time, "What did I do before this?"  Well, I asked questions, for one thing.  Some of them were smart.  Some were dumb.  Some were stupid.  Some were even "smart ass."  You know the kind:  "Do you have have Prince Albert in a can?"
Now that we have the Internet and Google, you can get Smart Ass questions by the dozen.  Except now they call them, "100 questions that you forgot to ask when you were growing up."   But it was really different then.  I remember my grandfather reading the newspaper a lot.  He used to say that the only thing anyone had to really learn in life was how to read.  I believed him then.  Now though I think I would challenge that.  After all if all anyone would learn is how to read, who could write anything for anybody else to read?  Hmmmm?  Never thought of that, did you Joe?  [Yes, that was his name, except in French it was always pronounced "Joseph."]  It's the same kind of question that I was asked when I first got to Italy.  "Why do the 'Federali' [Federal Police] always go around in pairs?"  Now this is a fairly intelligent question, right?  In this case it's the answer that is bent.  The correct answer is, "One knows how to read, one knows how to write."  One of them broke Joe's rule.
Seriously, the amount of information that is immediately available in today's world causes more questions than it gives answers.  It is really a very challenging world.  When a person my age has to wonder who ever needs a pencil any more.  I can't remember the last time I used a pencil.  Of course it goes without saying therefore, that I can't remember the last time that I used an eraser.  Hey, wait!  That's great.  That means that it's been a long time since I make a mistake.  I knew it.  I knew it.  I always did know that I hardly ever made mistakes.  I always knew that I was smarter than to make mistakes.  Maybe I was just using the eraser to keep in shape or something like that.
I really did not have to go far to research anything.  I just used to ask EFR Dion, and he would tell me.  If it was a catechism question, I would ask my grandfather, Joe, I mean, Joseph.  He was a walking encyclopedia about religion.  He had the right answer to everything about the Catholic religion.  I mean it.  I would ask him something I had never heard about before and he would say, "You don't know that?  You should know that, the Pope said so."  End of story.  Period.  No question mark.  If it was really important it had an exclamation point after the word Pope.  So apparently besides reading, you had to learn to hear what the Pope said too.
So all of this to say that I think a lot about how Ol' Larry and Sergei got to know so many things.  Maybe I should not care or worry about them.  All I have to do is to learn how to read the first 10 of the 371,978,466, 001 answers that they say they got when I punched in the question, "Stupid."
See, Grandpa Joe was right.  And I dared to doubt him...He's coming after me tonight, sure as hell.