There is a Web site called ExpertVillage.com that posts videos of "experts" explaining... everything, I guess.

One of their most famous experts is a young woman named Sarah Stetner, and by "famous" I mean that she is famous in the same way that Night Travels Of the Elven Vampire (the precursor to the inept vampire novel I have been posting about lately, only worse because--well, just look at the original cover art! Jesus!) (And speaking of apologetic vampires, which I did in my last couple of posts on the subject--does anyone think Orlando Bloom would rip some kid's arms off? Isn't it much likelier that he would feel kind of bad about the necessity of biting people and draining them of their blood? I think he'd be worse than Jerry Garcia!) is famous.

Ahem.

Anyway. ExpertVillage seems to have taken down most of this Sarah kid's videos, at least the ones where she is trying to teach you to longe and jump and all sorts of things for which she is flagrantly unqualified and might get someone killed. But they have left a few up, apparently to boost membership since you have to join ExpertVillage.com to register your natural response of WTF?

In this video, the one I linked in the previous post, she shows you how to measure a horse using what I call the Eensy-Weensy Spider method.

Now. She tells you that horses are measured in "hands." And she tells you that someone, presumably someone with a measuring tape, has measured her demonstration horse at 15.3 hands.

And then she uses her own hands to measure her horse and comes up with a measurement of twelve hands.

Just so we're all clear here, the unit of measurement called a "hand" is four inches. Exactly four inches. The measurement of your horse is not dependent on the size of your hands, any more than a room of a specific size is called ten or twelve feet wide depending on the size of the feet of the individual stepping off the space. A foot is twelve inches. A hand is four inches. Both are standard measures. Period.

If her horse is 15.3 (fifteen hands plus three inches) tall, then by my calculations her measure, using the Eensy-Weensy Spider Method, is incorrect by fifteen inches. That would be like me telling you I am four feet tall. (Or six-foot-nine, come to think of it.) You could say the reason her measurement is so outrageously wrong is because she's got her hands spread out to a width of at least six inches per. Which indicates she doesn't have any idea of the unit of measurement she's using.

And yet she is on a site called ExpertVillage.com, being touted as an "expert."

I point this out merely because, as a librarian, I often issue warnings to the unwary to be careful about believing everything they read on the Internet.

This? Is practically a test case. I only wish I had world enough and time to include it in every single one of my library resources classes, as an example of how wildly wrong the Internet can be.

On the other hand, it's funny shit.