Carlo Marotta: Bathsheba at the Bath
Frequently
Unanswered
Questions
by Jamie Jobb
Many a morning, I’ll awaken with a peculiar word sandwich unwrapped in my head. It might be a proper name. It might be a particular place. Or some oddball business brand. Any word-pair (or more) that never-knew-each-other-before-now.
Did Bathsheba shower?
I’ll presume.
Then I’ll google the phrase and realize that exact word combo already occurred to someone else out there in cyber-land. These frequent cold-drink-in-my-face results have forced me to re-approach my morning search for subconscious truth.
Now, I try to rephrase my odd-thought-at-dawn as some kind of Ask Jeeves question. Google has gotten quite great at what Ask Jeeves itself could never seem to get right. My Frequently Unanswered Questions may be dissimilar similes or mangled metaphors turned inside-out. But these FUQs intend to land with a dull flourish, like a Stephen Wright one-liner (“What’s another word for thesaurus?”). But of course, the ubiquitous search-engine-that-could unearths an answer to my oddball interrogatory every time – in mere femptoseconds.
Each FUQ below is embedded with its own link to its best answer.
