Comma Dot Comma

The book of love is long and boring

No one can lift the damn thing

It’s full of charts and facts and figures

And instructions for dancing

But I love it when you read to me

And you can read me anything.

–Magnetic Fields, song title: “The Book of Love”

Google. The famous once-darling, now-devil “do no evil” company and flagship search engine. There are so many fun things to do with its products.

• www.googlefight.com — let your favorite search terms go head-to-head (fyi: love beats death, God beats porn, feet beat boobs).
• www.googlewhack.com — find a two-word phrase that only returns one hit.
• www.googlesightseeing.com — weird things you can spot on Google Earth.
• www.answers.google.com This one is actually sponsored by Google, but you can pay someone to look up any old random thing you need to find, say, a particular large heart-shaped card.

A very tall and verbose lady came from the moving company yesterday to estimate the weight of all our worldly goods. I was at work, so I only got a report from Dr. G of her tumultuous and constant monologue as she wandered the rooms, peering in closets and cupboards. I’m so sad to have missed it. Sample excerpt:

“Oh, you’re going to teach criminology? I had a client recently who was a history teacher. Like I told him, my philosophy of life is that history just repeats itself, in cycles, the same thing over and over. I don’t think it will be long until we start fighting all our wars with drones. World War III will be with drones. But really all the world leaders should get together and play Pong to solve their problems.”