Here's an interesting diversion, if you're sad, or bored, or both. As you're probably aware, almost everything on Wikipedia links to something else on Wikipedia. Just to see where it took me I decided to start from a random page - in this case Neil Armstrong - and follow the tenth link on each subsequent page to see where I ended up. The idea was that when I got to the tenth page I would read that one in its entirety. As well as gaining some new knowledge at the end, I figured I would pick up some interesting nuggets I didn't know before along the way, and I was right. Did you know that West Point Military Academy is in New York State, overlooking the Hudson River? That the Dutch East India Company was the first multinational company in the world, and the first to issue stock? What the Batavian Republic was? Unfortunately my plan to get into progressively more specialised areas somewhat backfired when the tenth link on the Patriot Party (political faction of the Dutch Republic) was United States... but I still ended up with something quite interesting:

Neil Armstrong
David Scott
West Point
Hudson River
Dutch East India Company
Batavian Republic
Patriot Party
United States
Canada
French colonisation of the Americas

Then I had another go, starting (as we approach the 60th anniversary of the health service) with arguably my least favourite institution, BUPA:

BUPA
Leeds
Historic counties of England
The Bishop of Durham
Family name
Mr
American English
German language
Linguistic geography of Switzerland
French language

Not bad. I'm not sure if ten links is enough to get you away from the ones which are very similar to the topic you're on. Then again, Neil Armstrong to French colonisation is quite a journey, as is BUPA to French language (anybody still doubting that Wikipedia is part of a French conspiracy?)

If I were Dave Gorman I'd have visited all these places by now and made a supposedly spontaneous but in reality meticulously planned documentary about them. And given that my weblog is now apparently a hotbed of media research, any journalists reading this please note that I thought of this first and if you stick it in your newspapers I want my cut! Likewise if it takes off as on online cult, I want everybody pointed back to my weblog. I like the idea of thousands and thousands of people ending up here thinking "this is drivel".