I still remember the time I was walking around my elementary school playground with my friends. I was again amazed by a friend of mine who seemed know everything there was worth knowing about. Whatever the subject, maths, nature, technology, he seemed to be on top of things. I guess he was good at hiding the lack of information when there was a discussion about a subject he didn't know. Whatever the case, there was something that made me think, I want to be something like that someday. I started to visit school library more often. Usually I'd lend books to try to study or learn something new. This surely improved my reading skills, but I think I never really learned a lot. It was maybe because the way read those books. At one time we had to read a book and write a short essay about it. Once again I visited the elementary school library and lent a book. At home I started reading it. After a while my sister walked pass me. Then she returned and asked: "You really can't be reading so fast?" she asked. "What do you mean, I'm pretty fast reader" I said a bit proudly and turned the page again. "So tell me, what happened on the last page?". I looked at her and opened my mouth. Nothing came out. "Uhmm there was something about a teacher". She laughed at me and walked away. It hit me, I wasn't really trying to understand this, I was just consuming the letters and words as quickly as I could. After this incident I realized that all the "reading" I had done didn't actually help me a lot. I knew a weird fact or two but I really didn't understand any subject as a whole although I had read a lot about all sorts of things, nature and technology especially. So, I never got to the point where I'd be the one telling everybody how things work and who was to blame for the war in some weird place long time ago. I'm a bit sad about it, because as a child I was also keen on watching different game shows from tv. At then there wasn't a studio host building drama around the player who tried to answer to question 1+1=? or a possiblity to ask help from an studio audince. There was a person asking questions and one or more others trying to answer them. There were some legendary participants who knew the answer to just about any question. No matter the topic, they knew who painted the roof of a curch that was demolished hundreds of years ago or what was the main ingredient in some weird chemical mixture. And of course they knew who finished fifth at the half national wrestling competition that was held some fifty years ago. They also knew that his mother in law was later involved in a scheme to get some additional income from the local covernment in questionable way. She was never convicted though. How was it possible for anyone to have such amount of knowledge. While I will never get that amount of information in me and most of us might have at least some gaps in some topics, we should be happy that we got the next best thing, or actually two of them: internet and Jon Skeet