Pretty much everything I do, from my writing to my day job, is built on a foundation of my hi-fi memory. I have memories from before I could walk or speak. I could tell you every detail of a stormy day my parents insisted on taking baby-me to the beach…but because baby-me didn’t know at the time which beach it was, I had to tell the story to my dad to find that out later (it was Jones Beach in NYC). Now that Google has put the whole of human knowledge in our pockets at all times, you’d think it would be easy for me to add missing context to any of my memories this way, simply by describing them to my phone.
Well, not always: turns out there are some things so obscure they never made it onto the Internet, forcing me to use other, more analog sources just to prove that whatever I’m remembering even existed in the first place. When I succeed, I’ve decided I’ll post the results here, for the purpose of filling in Google’s own gaps.