I’m the first person to admit that I spent an inordinate amount of time during the internet’s early years checking out The Really Big Button That Doesn’t Do Anything and The Shakespeare Insult Generator. Somehow, the lure of these sites defies any kind of logic other than the need to see them first and then tell other people about them.

The internet has become a vast freeway of information you can cruise to get to strange and amazing places, but what happens when you decide to check out a secondary road and end up in a place you never wanted to be?

A case in point is a site featuring a page of pictures of dogs wearing lobster costumes which was brought to my attention during a casual discussion about weird internet content.

Wow, I thought, now there’s a great way to spend a couple of minutes that I’ll never get back, and, of course, I had to check it out. Up until then, I never realized how much I’d wanted to see canines dressed up as crustaceans.

Once I’d scrolled through the gallery, though, my mind was suddenly awash with more productive activities I could be doing instead. Judging by the looks on the faces of some of the dogs, it was kind of obvious that there were DEFINITELY other things they would rather be doing.

The site already had a fairly healthy hit tally, so I guess I was a little late on getting the word out. I’d probably be told that a lobster-dog picture was old news and if I wanted to see something really interesting, I should try goldfish-in-tutus.com.

The problem was that once I’d seen those pictures, I couldn’t get them out of my mind.

I actually had a dream featuring one of the dogs; it was a walk-through role, I admit, but the dog was there. Up until I’d gone to the site, I can truthfully say that this concept had never crossed my mind, but now it was indelibly imprinted on my subconscious.

When I got up this morning, I opened the front curtains and saw a dog out on a walk with its master. Geepers, I thought, what an interesting-looking pooch.

Then, almost instantaneously, I thought about how it would look wearing a lobster costume.

Whoa.

That’s it, I’m afraid. I’m destined to spend the next six months imagining every dog I see disguised as some kind of aquatic life form. “Say, have you ever considered strapping a couple of cloth claws and some antennae on Old Rex?”

Not only that, but now that the idea is mulling around in my mind, what if it mutates to include other animals? What about cats wearing sequin-covered shirts and tiny sombreros?

Here, kitty-kitty. Insert scary music here.

It occurred to me that maybe I should swear off this kind of surfing and stick with sites that don’t mess with reality for a while, but according to the CBC, the problem is that most of them mess with it all the time, even the ones that you would think don’t. Apparently, not all the maps used in GPS systems are entirely accurate, and maps of the world produced by Google vary according to the political position of the country where you get access. This puts it on par with asking someone for directions who doesn’t really know how to get there and just makes something up that sounds good.

I guess that’s one thing about the internet you can always be sure about: uncertainty.