Another distraction: The Grand Canal

Well I just found an unpublished post, and maybe that's just as well, but I'll publish it anyway.
Re-reading it and reflecting upon it, I see that it captures two features of internet research:
1. How easy (and how much fun) it is to stray from the subject at hand.
2. How contradictory and unverifiable the information can be.

and here's the unpublished post. . .

Bamber Gascoigne's short entry on the Grand Canal in China on his site
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa19>TEXT
whetted my curiosity, so I Googled Grand Canal China. Here are a few of the sites I visited.
http://www.chinatown-online.com/cultureeye/highlights/grand.htm
had some salacious stuff about the Emperor who did the heavy lifting (and brutalizing) of connecting smaller canals into the Grand Canal in the 7th century.
The Wikipedia site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29#English
wasn't that helpful, due to the lack of good maps, or that interesting, due to the writing.
http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/879134
was a better read, and led me to a few photography sites with Grand Canal shots. In some places houses back up to the canal walls, Venice-like, and stone steps lead down to water level, also like Venice. Gorgeous.
But at this point, let's face it, I don't need to know the exact route of The Grand Canal. Nor do I need to sort out the snarl of conflicting information that I found. I know what I need to know about The Grand Canal in order to get on with the Erie Canal.
Time to shut down this distraction and get focused again.