Sometimes using the Web loses all its charm, because you’re too focused on problem-solving.

You need the answer to a question, say, about some damn thing or other that’s locking your computer up, and you don’t know if it’s Linux, or a video driver, or that cheese Danish which inadvertently fell from your mouth (of course it was inadvertent; you wouldn’t do something that stupid on purpose!) — where you’d parked it for a moment while swapping in the RAM upgrade, you just needed two hands for, like, three seconds — fell, as I was saying, into the guts of your computer, and when you went to scoop it up it just sort of schmeared across the surfaces and into the guts of what seems to be a satellite’s-eye view of two hundred silicon-and-plastic-and-steel skyscrapers waaaaay down at the end of a SimCity “game,” the boring part where you know you’re going to have to call down an earthquake or tornado or a major tax hike, inciting SimRevolution, just to keep from falling asleep with your hand on the mouse and dragging an entire suburb across the mountains.

At such moments, it’s easy to be overawed by the fact that Google actually returns close to 9,000 hits when you search on the words linux, video, driver, cheese, and danish (using The Missus’s computer, of course, since your own, at the moment, has as little to do with computing as it does with, say, dishwashing). It’s easy to be flat-out annoyed by that, in fact. Doesn’t Google know this is serious? You need an answer, damn it! An answer. An, as in one. You don’t need random attention-deficit Google-musings.

At such moments, congratulations, jerk: you’ve forgotten what the Web was like in, say, 1996. No Google. No MSN. No Yahoo. Very little, in fact, except the primo contribution of the Web to human communication: hyperlinks.

You’ve forgotten the unexpected pleasures you can get from simply hop-skip-jumping.

About a week ago, I stumbled across the blog known as “Seven Impossible Things to Do Before Breakfast.” (And I’d thought “Running After My Hat” was an ambitious blog name…) It didn’t take me long to add it to the Je Ne Sais Quoi… blogroll category, over there on the right. And one of these days I’ll do a post about it.

This post, though, is about a surprise I got from simply following a link — or rather, a couple of links: from the most recent 7-Imp entry, to a post on another blog by someone named Haven Kimmel. My curiosity was triggered simply by the phrase “The Sopranos.”

Now, I’ve almost lost my sense of surprise that wonderful New York Times bestselling writers have been doing their work for years, quite successfully, with no help at all from my wallet or even my admiration, let alone fanboyishness. Almost, but not quite. And so I can’t help asking the question: Where has Haven Kimmel been, where did she come from, and why haven’t I heard of her before?!?

Okay. I sorta understand. But now I’ve got some catching up to do (and you may, too).

In the meantime, I’ll refer you to an early post on her blog — or rather to its title, “Haven’s First Law: Never Quote A Better Writer Than Yourself.” Because I’m about to quote, very briefly, from her children’s book Orville: A Dog Story (2003):

Orville barked and barked against his chain. And right in the middle of a long summer day, when he had barked about how he was really a good dog in a bad mood, and how he missed that one-eyed doll, and how there was something so terrible about the feeling of a chain against a neck, everything changed, because a girl with cotton-candy hair moved into the little house across the road and Orville fell in love.

And then, just because I don’t trust you to follow the above link to her “Sopranos” post, there’s this:

…perhaps things were slightly askew in my psyche, because in an e-mail exchange between three friends I was asked to name off the top of my head (seriously! think fast!) how I would choose to die if I only had twenty-four hours. What would I do, spend my last day hysterical over my motherless children? Try to see the Seven or Ten or Eight Wonders of the World? God, no. I answered as honestly as humanly possible. I said, “I would want to spend 24 hours with Tony Soprano and then I would want him to shoot me in the heart.”

Ha!