Local Man's 'Quick Google' Enters Its Fourth Hour
A Dayton, Ohio, man who sat down Thursday afternoon to check the runtime of a 2003 action film has reportedly spent the last four hours reading a 14th-century papal decree, with no recollection of the intervening steps.
DAYTON, Ohio — A local man who announced to his wife at approximately 1:15 p.m. Thursday that he was going to do "a quick Google" to settle a trivia dispute about the 2003 film The Italian Job was discovered four hours later reading the full Latin text of Unam Sanctam, Pope Boniface VIII's 1302 declaration of papal supremacy, sources close to the situation confirmed.
Kevin Dalloway, 41, a regional sales coordinator from the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek, has been unable to provide investigators — specifically, his wife, Linda — with a coherent account of the intellectual journey that carried him from a film's runtime to a medieval ecclesiastical document.
"He said 'one second,'" Linda Dalloway told reporters gathered in the kitchen doorway. "That was at one-fifteen. Dinner is on the table."
Forensic analysis of Dalloway's browser history, which now contains 74 open tabs, suggests a route that passed through the filmography of actor Edward Norton, the history of the Venice canal system, the disputed origins of the hot dog, a Reddit thread about competitive luge equipment regulations from 2011, and at least three separate Wikipedia articles on the Byzantine Empire before arriving at medieval canon law.
"The tabs are not chaos. They are a record of a man following every thought to its logical conclusion. The tragedy is that there is no conclusion."
Dr. Pamela Schrute-Voss, Associate Professor of Digital Cognition and Regrettable Decision-Making at the Franklin Institute for Browsing Studies, said the phenomenon Dalloway experienced is clinically understood and carries no known cure.
"We call it Recursive Curiosity Collapse," Dr. Schrute-Voss explained from her office, where she had intended to check one email. "Each tab feels like the last tab. It never is."
At press time, Dalloway had successfully determined that The Italian Job runs 111 minutes, a fact he established approximately three hours and fifty-eight minutes ago and immediately abandoned upon noticing a hyperlink reading "Charlize Theron — Early Life."
Dalloway confirmed he intends to close all 74 tabs "in a sec," after which he plans to look up one quick thing about the Avignon Papacy, which he described as "actually pretty wild if you think about it."
He is not thinking about dinner.
Linda has begun eating alone.
This article was generated by a large language model. It is satire. None of it happened.
