Talking with my brother is like surfing the web. Conversation proceeds along one topic until we hit an interesting hypertext link, at which point we click on it, go somewhere only tangentially related to the topic at hand, and continue to follow these hypertext links until we're somewhere completely unrelated to our original topic of discussion, albeit one that nonetheless remains fascinating or at least amusing.

Of course, on the Internet, a half-dozen or so such links will take you to a porn site. (More on that later.)

Zero said something Sunday evening during a phone conversation about a mishap that involved ruining eggs. Given that we were talking on Easter, I immediately thought of the Peanuts holiday special, "It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown." This is the Peanuts special that introduced Peppermint Patty's new friend, Marcy, who had a knack for ruining eggs by the dozen as Peppermint Patty tried to introduce her to the world of Easter eggs. The running joke was that Marcy kept misunderstanding how to prepare the eggs, and as the special wore on, would fry them, bake them, put them in the waffle iron, and (finally) boil them in water, making egg soup.

I should mention that Brian was talking to me on his cell phone. When he told me that he had been reading a "Peanuts" collection where Charlie Brown actually gets his kite in the air, I heard him as saying something about "a tiger next door."

This is the hypertext link where things went south as they only can when you have two geeks on the phone.

"What," I asked, "was Schulz trying to boost the strip's appeal toward the end, by having Calvin move in next door?"

"Of course," Brian said. "Remember how Snoopy was always worried about the cat next door? It makes sense, if you consider that the cat is actually a tiger."

A tiger? Hobbes is no tiger. He's a kzin. And Charlie Brown? He lives in Cabot Cove, Maine.

At this point, we were both cracking up at our connection to our 12-year-old speculation that Jessica Fletcher was either a serial killer responsible for the string of deaths in "Murder, She Wrote," or at least a crime boss who ordered the hits. Neither of us can remember why kzinti would be running around that little New England hamlet, but the link is cemented firmly in place, and now it has annexed "Peanuts."

Among our other ideas tonight:

• Snoopy flies his doghouse into deep space on a mission for the puppeteers, and he discovers that the galactic core has exploded. "Curse you, Speaker-to-Animals!"
• Linus is related to Carlos Wu. He is also the human most feared by the Puppeteers, for his vast intellect.
• Charlie Brown and all the others have been taking boosterspice. That is why they are still young after 50 years or more of publishing history.

At some point, my brother marveled that we had made it to Known Space, and he couldn't even remember how we got to a discussion on "Peanuts." I made the comparison to web surfing, which caused him to object on the grounds that six clicks supposedly is all it takes to get to a porn web site, and neither of us wanted to go there in our discussion.

Now of course Zero had to mention that he had read an article online that discussed this very phenomenon, and that the fellow had created such a web site to illustrate his point. Specific details are fuzzy at this point. If he corrects me, I will amend this post. At this point I said something about such sites existing -- I fished around for something sufficiently euphemistic but not crude -- for people to "wax the chicken."

"Wax the chicken?"

OK, it was a weird expression, so I can't blame him too much for not getting what I was getting at. (The domain name waxthechicken.com remains unclaimed, though it's possible one of us will have parked it by this time tomorrow.)

"You know," I said. "Polish the bayonet. Strangle the chicken."

"What are you talking about?" He was still laughing, because these were ridiculous expressions; and now I was laughing, with incredulity. I mean, didn't this guy go to the same high school as me, 25 years ago or so?

"Those are euphemisms for acts of gratification that adult males and teenage boys perform by themselves," I said.

He got it. And in about a half-dozen clicks, our verbal hypertext links had taken us to a porn site.