Howlin' Wolf and Snickers: Closer Than You'd Think

Nothing satisfies like...

The modern era in which we live offers many advantages (like the polio vaccine, for instance, or Pop Rocks brand candy), but does it also have the unintended consequence of blurring the line between the insane and sane in our society? I'm not just talking about hands-free cellphone technology, although the recent multiplication of people walking down the street talking to "invisible" companions is certainly unnerving.

The sheer amount of information available to us through a proliferation of media outlets contributes to an unhealthy obsession with minutiae (much like the struggles of "Double Dare" host, Marc Summers). Call it "obsessive compulsive trivia disorder," or OCTD. Similarly to the universal nexus that is Kevin Bacon, the degrees of separation between seemingly disparate phenomena are rapidly dwindling, creating an exponential growth in connectivity. I'll give you an example from my own life: in the song "Goin' Down Slow," by Howlin' Wolf, he uses the phrase "great googily moogily." I knew I had heard this before, but where? I asked around, and though many attested to its familiarity, no one could figure out from whence it came. It came to obsess me; I could think of no other thing.

Fortunately, as they often do, my own personal Girl Friday came through in the clutch. The line is uttered by the hapless groundskeeper of the Kansas City "Chefs" in a Snickers bar commercial from 1996. Thus the logical connection between candy bars and the author of the self-referential song, "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy," was revealed.

Or perhaps I'm the only one suffering from OCTD. Despair.