Electrical Dreams and Grammatical Reality

Many years ago when I was a young whippersnapper growing up in Pittsburgh*, I wanted to be a scientist. I loved the imagery of laboratories with colored liquids bubbling in strange glass vessels, of sparks climbing jacob's ladders or zipping from van de Graaf generators, of the whole arcane mystique of science. I eventually matriculated** at Penn State University, where (much to my father's pride) I began my quest to become a chemical engineer.

But then my scholarship crashed on the jagged reefs of differential and integral calculus, sinking all my dreams of cackling hysterically in my vast mountaintop laboratory ...

And I ended up with a degree in Linguistics, having traded laboratory glassware and electrical displays for (much to my father's dismay) the arcane mysteries of German grammar and acoustic phonetics***.

Sigh.

I thought about this today when I ran across this wonderful sendup of the impossibly complex electrical diagrams that I was never able to understand ...

... and I decided that German grammar and the Cyrillic alphabet weren't so bad after all.

So, Dear Readers, did you realize your dreams? Are you still working on them? Want to share? Leave a comment, and let's see where we're all going together.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* As opposed to an old curmudgeon grouching along in Springfield.

** But I had to stop, because I heard I'd go blind if I kept it up.

*** I can now refer to a raspberry as an elongated bilateral labial fricative.