Dear Internet, Please make up your mind. Sincerely, Tim

The internet is not always helpful.


Sometimes I think it would be just as effective to sit in the cart exchange area with the faux-stone floor at Wal-Mart and ask passers-by for the information I need.

“Hello there. Hey, was 1967 the Summer of Love? Not sure? Well, if you had to guess, what would you say? 1965?! I don’t think … Hello there. Hey …”

It would be like a living, breathing, social networking Wikapedia.

As the Bing.com commercials suggest, Google is downright ridiculous in providing information. I just googled (yes, it is a verb, good heavens) “Leonard Bernstein,” and got 1.77 million hits. After scanning about half of them, I can clearly see that not all the references are to Leonard Bernstein. To check this anomaly I googled my own name, and got even more hits than Bernstein – 2.54 million. Of these, only three refer to actually me; and several hundred actually refer to Bernstein. There is a photo of him and me together in 1955 – two years before I was born.

Apparently in googleland there is no degree of separation between persons.

Specifically regarding tortoises – I can tell by the questions and comments that other people have posted in groups, forums and QA formats – I am not alone in my http befuddlement.

For example, coconut coir is recommended by 7.9 billion tortoise people as a good substrate (or flooring) for a Russian tortoise (sometimes called horsfields, which is from their species name horsfieldii, the Latinesque version of their inventor, Alexander Graham Horsfield, known for shouting to his assistant, “Mr. Watson! Come here! This reptile has pooped without warning all over my plastron studies! I need you!”)

Okay, but one guy on YouTube (my go-to site for unambiguous, unbiased info) says that he “does not recommend” coconut coir for Russians. Any other tortoise is okay with coconut coir, but the placement of the eyes on the horsfield (something A.G. Horsfield overlooked) makes them prone to get coconut coir poked in their eyeballs. It is sort of like locking me in a room and playing nothing but country music all the time. Talk about your constant misery.

Beings as I still don’t know what coir is, and no one in my state seems to carry it, (Do you have coconut coir? No? What about raspberry coir? Or, just unflavored coir?) I have in this case avoided the majority viewpoint, and tend to believe the eyeball theory.

For another example, let’s take a tortoise question that should have a cut-and-dried answer: Shall I feed my Russian tortoise any fruits? Yes, or no. What do you say, Internet?

Ten minutes of surfing revealed this: 20 percent of their diet should be fruit … Fruit causes loose stools … Fruits are not recommended for horsfields … Give them fruit for a treat … Fruit can cause parasite buds … Any fruit is okay, except bananas … What about tomatoes? Only in months that have five Saturdays.

Other dietary advice from the Internet: Chard should be a regular part of the diet … chard should be avoided … Offer your tortoise cucumbers … Cucumbers should be kept to a bare minimum.

Clearly, as long as there is an internet, the horsfields don’t have a chance.