Billy's Opinion: Trying to Understand the Sequester: A Live Blog

If you're like me, you have heard about a sequester in some way related to the federal government. And you have no idea what it means. Since it's my job to cover the day's news and junk, I figured it's about time I learn what is going on, using only the internet at my fingertips. To Wikipedia!

7:30am-- We hit our first road block. Search Wikipedia for "sequester" and you get this disambiguation page.

7:31-- Second road block. I want to look up SeaQuest real quick to see if it was a real show or if I'm imaging it.

It was real. Guess what it was about?

C-Quest, though, is not. It's a movie I just came up in which two teen slackers have to work hard in the last two weeks of high school in order to graduate. Spoiler alert: They fail, but in the process learn a much more valuable lesson dot dot dot about themselves.

7:35-- Back on track. I'm going to click a link to something called "Budget sequestration," because that seems relevant. This page is really boring.

7:45-- I've been staring at this page for ten minutes and I still haven't read the first sentence. Better scroll down to see if there are charts.

Oh God, no charts! I'm leaving this page. Thankfully, they link to a page about the current debate.

Just glancing over these paragraphs, it looks like about 60% of the text is compromised of numbers. This is going to be hard to follow.

7:50-- My eyes glazed over. That is, until I saw a link to a page about B61 Nuclear Bombs! I wonder how awesome they are.

Their blast yield is 0.3-340 kilotons. What's that mean? Better search "blast yield."

8:00-- Here's a sweet picture.

Okay back to the sequester. This Wikipedia page isn't getting me anywhere. That may not be the fault of its writers. I just haven't read a word of it since I landed here. So I'm going to take to Google.

A search of "explain the sequester" brings up a bunch of results that look promising. I'll try Gawker's first because it is on top.

Ugh it's some bullshit thing trying to use popular culture to make me interested. But Ryan Gosling makes me feel so inadequate! Also, orange block text annoys me. Let's go back to the Google search.

8:10-- I've decided on looking at this Washington Post blog explaining it. But I can't get past the picture of Obama, gesturing up to where he's had it from the likes of Boehner or Congress or whoever the hell is responsible for whatever he disagrees with.

Oh damn it, this article is from last September. On the internet, that's like forever ago. For God's sake, Gangnam Style wasn't even halfway to a billion views yet!

8:20-- This now officially the longest I've ever spent searching the internet for information. By 30 minutes, I would either have it or give up, because if it takes 30 minutes to find an easy-to-understand description of certain facts, then those facts do not exist. But I'm going to stick with it. I'm taking this search to Twitter for #sequester.

8:25-- OH MY GOD IT'S ALL RACIAL SLURS.

8:30-- A lot of sarcastic jokes by people who also probably don't understand the sequester. I'll add my own: "Sequester? I hardly know her!"

8:35-- #Sequester must mean something I don't understand, because someone used it to refer to cocaine. To UrbanDictionary.com!

Jesus, that's way dirtier than I was expecting. Could this be what Congress is so worried about?

Most of these tweets are spam. No useful information. To Facebook!

8:45-- So much caps lock.

It looks like there's no easy way out of this. I'm going to have to actually read something. Let's go back to that Wikipedia page. Be back when I read it.

9:05-- Okay, so I accidentally read the entire page about SeaQuest. Now, to that page about the sequester.

Now I want to look at the editing history.

Surprisingly not very active.  Interestingly, someone noted that the San Francisco Giants won the 2010 World Series, because of some minute detail of the TV show that only someone who would edit the Wikipedia page of a fifteen year-old sci-fi TV show would pay attention to. Also interestingly, they spell "real life" with a hypen: "real-life." Someone later removed that entire paragraph on April 24, 2012.

On December 12, 2011, someone changed "circa" to "c."

There is actually some controversy over whether Roy Scheider said the show was a cross between 21 Jump Street and Star "Trek" or "Dreck." Apparently he said "Dreck," but obviously meant "Trek," so there's debate over which word should appear on the page. I'll add my two cents by saying nobody gives a shit.

9:45-- Well that took a lot longer than expected. Back to the sequester page. I'll read it this time.

10:00-- Oh. That's actually pretty straight forward. Well, I hope it doesn't happen.

Well, there you have it. Now I know what the sequester is. Thanks for following along.