The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

After days of agonizing over much hard work lost to a dead hard drive. After weeks of researching digital news media for an upcoming story. After months glued to my laptop for your reading pleasure. I took refuge last night in a friend's home, where I can always turn for the simplest bohemian pleasures. Five to seven bodies huddled in a dim-lit room strumming guitars and plucking banjos, blowing blues harps and crafting verse.

But even the most sacred of spaces has been infiltrated by the net, even the doggerel.

Charlie has a daughter who's 19 years old. His name's not Charlie, but he has a daughter, and his daughter's name's not Ann. Ann lost her billfold, he says, this man that's not Charlie, of his daughter, who's not Ann. She lost her billfold with her driver's license, credit cards, $70 in cash, and a check for her rent. She really lost her billfold.

Some man found Ann's wallet. Or he found someone else's whose name is not Ann. And he looked her up on Facebook. And he found this girl, not Ann. And now he wants to meet her, though he knows her name's not Ann. And now she wants to meet him, to get her billfold from the man.

My advice: "Don't go alone."

A conversation about Puerto Rican nationalism — yes, I confess, not a rare topic of conversation when I'm around — leads to an argument over who was president when four Puerto Rican nationalists held up congress in 1954. Why wonder when Google lies awake in the next room? Was it I who woke the beast?

Truman. It was Truman. No, not this Truman, Harry S. Truman.

And now twenty minutes spent on Sneezing Panda and the like. Six million people across the globe have done the same.

And close to a million have watched three-year-old Kassie tell us what she's going to do if a monster comes for her.

There was a dachshund in the house, which explains this one. "Wait. Wait. Listen to what she says at the end," says another Charlie, who is not Charlie, to another Ann, who is not Ann."

"Have you seen Dramatic Chipmunk?" 5,752,712 people have now wasted five seconds of their time. That's a total of 479,393 minutes, or 7,990 hours, or 333 days. Good thing it's short. We've wasted close to a year.