The Inter-Ghost Connection

The other day I was chatting with my brother (the smarter brother of Sherlock Holmes) on the phone, and he said something that may have some truth to it - I was predisposed, from early childhood, to understand and like the Web and the blogs. How? By reading and re-reading a million times the books about the adventures of The Three Investigators. Actually, only four of the early books in the series were tranlated into Serbo-Croatian, but I read them over and over. Later, here in the USA, I managed to find and read a few more in English.

What does that have to do with blogging? Well, back in the 1960s when the adventures were going on, there were no computers and the Internet. Yet, the three intrepid boys had to use their smarts and every contraption they could build from readily available materials, to solve mysteries and catch criminals. Usually, there would be something apparently supernatural happening and Jupiter Jones, Pete Cranshaw and Bob Andrews would figure out the completely natural explanation for it - usually some smokscreen built by the villain in order to cover his tracks (Mary V. Carey, one of the author of later volumes, broke this essential rule and left some supernatural stuff as such at the great consternation of readers who were all budding skeptics).

One of the inventions they came up with was the Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup:

Developed by Jupe in "Stuttering Parrot," the Ghost to Ghost hookup was designed to get a lot of kids looking for something or someone at once without each person having to be personally contacted by the Three Investigators. Jupe, Pete, and Bob would each phone five friends and ask for the requested information. If none of those fifteen boys could help, then they would pass the message along to five each of their friends. The sheer numbers involved made it possible to mobilize the kids of Rocky Beach in a short time to be on the lookout for whatever person or object the boys were hunting. Jupe named it "Ghost to Ghost" because they would most likely not know who would be calling with information, and the voices on the phone would appear like "ghosts" to the boys, plus the name has flavor and color. The down side to the hookup was that all the phones in Rocky Beach would have busy signals while the messages were being passed along. The Ghost to Ghost Hookup helps out in several cases, including "Stuttering Parrot," "Whispering Mummy," "Crooked Cat," "Shrinking House," and others.

Or, from here:

Perhaps you remember the moment in The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot when Bob and Jupiter, together, invent the Ghost-To-Ghost hookup? As Jupiter points out, the scheme could be used for contacting people "all the way from here to the Atlantic Ocean, if necessary. That would make it a Coast-To-Coast Hookup. But such a phrase has been used in the past by the television and radio networks. I prefer to be distinctive. So we will call ours a Ghost-To-Ghost Hookup." In the Ghost-To-Ghost Hook-up, each of the Three Investigators calls five friends and asks each of the friends to call five more friends, and asks those in turn to call five more, and so on, until as Jupiter puts it, "we get results."

You can find more about the books (and the movie coming out in a few months - I am excited!) here, here and here.

First, let me say that the 'Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup' was translated into Serbo-Croatian as "medjuduhovski spoj" whcih then translates back into English as "Interghost Connection", a term I prefer to the original.

And, that is what we want whenever we post something online. If I want to get some informaiton out, or ask a question, I do not call five friends, but write a blog post. The post will be seen by about 1500 people on the first day, then cumulatively by as many or more over the subseuqne days and weeks. If the information is deemed important or interesting by the readers, they can take any kind of action. Know the answer? Post it in a comment or send me an e-mail. If not, you can print out the post and show the hardcopy version to your computer-shy friends. You can click on the "e-mail this article" button and send it to your friends. Or, you can click on one of the buttons on the bottom and send the information to places like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot or Stumbelupon. You can place a link to it in the Notes on your facebook profile or MySpace. You can post the information and the link on your own blog. Unlike telephones - the lines are never busy. Unlike telephones, there is no game of broken telephones: copy+paste coupled with the link to the original post makes the spread of information in high fidelity. So, instead of covering the small town of Rocky Beach in a few hours, I can, theoretically, cover half of the world in a few minutes, especially if he informaiton is really important.

So, once I saw my first blog, I subconsciously realized that this is the superior and modern version of the Interghost Connection. Remembering its effectiveness from the old books, of course I was immeditaelly drawn to use this way of communication for my own nefarious purposes. And I am still doing it, apparently....