As the years pass, you can get increasingly attached to familiar things to the detriment of new discoveries. For just about everyone, life made more sense when you were 10 or 20 years old and things can seem increasingly idiotic and puzzling as you get older. This is especially true if you were born in the 2nd half of the 20th Century when the pace of technological change has gone into warp speed. For earlier generations, those changes made manual work less burdensome and improved living standards, but increasingly the changes foisted on us seem arbitrary and driven by corporate interests - the gains seem more and more marginal and our quality of life gets worse as much as it gets better. You have to seek newness sometime lest you get set in your ways. I have a few go-to recipes that rarely fail but I decided to try a new one and it featured a detail I'd never encountered before. Half an onion with a Bay leaf pierced by a clove nailing it in place like a thumbtack holding a note in a bulletin board. Cool. Never saw that one before. Having a universe of information at your fingertips is daunting and sometimes overwhelming but it has its advantages, too. Beyond the facades of virtual  corporate storefronts are boxes and boxes of novelties to unpack.