I Love the Internet!
On the drive into work this morning, I thought about a book that I read back around 6th or 7th grade. The book was “The Man in the Maze.” I could remember the title and the basic storyline, but not the author, publisher, ISBN, publication date or many of the other critical elements necessary to find the book. I plugged in the title into Google and added “novel” to the end of it. The first link was to the Evil Overlords, Amazon, so I followed it. The synopsis of the story matched what I had thought the story to be, so I snagged the ISBN from the summary data and ran over to half.com and searched for it. Sure enough, there were plenty of copies for purchase, but many of them were priced well over $70. That was a stupid amount of money for a book that’s not even leather-bound or signed. At the bottom of the page, I noticed a section marked “Other Editions,” so I followed the link to the first printing, just to see how much more stupid the prices could get. Much to my surprise and pleasure, there were several copies marked as “Like New” for $0.75.
To make a long story a little longer, I snagged a copy for the seventy-five cents (plus almost four dollars in shipping) and it’s already on its way to me!
If you know me well, then you know I have a huge backlog of books to read. Yep. This one will go in the pile, but it’ll probably go in the “keep forever” shelf since I’ve been thinking about this fantastic science fiction book for about ten years now.
I Love Google!
A co-worker was telling me of a movie, but could not remember the lead actor’s name nor the movie title. It did sound interesting enough that I wanted to see it with a beer or two in me. The premise of the movie went something like this:
The protagonist is imprisoned for a crime and frozen for 1,000 years. During that time all of the smart people decided to stop having kids because of the expense, hassle or whatever. However, the idiots of the world kept having kids “like rabbits.” When the protagonist wakes up from his incarceration, his formerly average intelligence is now nearly superhuman as compared to the rest of the world.
He was unable to find the movie in his head or on IMDB (no actor and no title makes it rough.) I turned to Google and entered, “movie future people get dumber” and the first link was this one. Idiocracy was the name of the movie.
It’s for this reason that I love Google. It makes finding rare, obscure and seemingly irrelevant facts easy to find.
Thank you, Google!
