Saturday, September 5, 2009

Googles of Fun

One of the best purchases my father Horace ever made was a brand new set of World Book Encyclopedias. When I was a young Sh*t, I spent hours and hours with those books, researching subjects I was interested in, discovering interesting facts about the world I lived in and killing spiders.

I remember thinking back then, “Wouldn’t it be cool if all this information was indexed in an easy to navigate system, and furthermore, wouldn’t it be awesome if everyone in the world could access it and add to it?”

I distinctly remember discussing my ideas with my buddies Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and they thought it was the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. Sergey said I was an A-hole, and I said he was an A-hole squared, and it went back and forth like that until I called him an “A-hole googoled.” Knowing he was outclassed, he ran home crying, with Larry tagging along looking like he was about to crap his pants.

Now, I’m not saying those two jerks stole my idea and name and ran with it. However, it’s a fact that Sergey was such an A-hole that he didn’t even know what the term “googol” meant.

A googol is the large number 10 to the 100th power; that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros in decimal representation. The term was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, when he was nine years old. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination. Other names for googol include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale.

The true irony is that I used Google to quickly gather that information about “googol”.

I was thinking this week how much easier Google makes my life when I was farting around with another parody song after hearing Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” while on the bike at the gym.

Fat Pants Fever

Well they filled my closet up, wall to wall,
Ugly things that came from the Big & Tall.
I really hate wearin’ what I wore.
I hope you know I don’t wear ‘em any more.

They gave me fat pants fever (waaa-wa-waaa)
Fat pants fever.

But that wasn’t enough for an entire post, so I Googled other Ted Nugent songs, thinking I could replace them with silly names to fill out the post. Such as…

  • Just What The Doctor Ordered (Phentermine)
  • Free-For-All (at the Old-Way Buffet)
  • Dog Eat Dog (Suprisingly Low in Points)
  • Motor City Madhouse (Must Be Weigh-In Day)
  • Paralyzed (by Hunger)
  • Stranglehold (on my Scale)
  • Baby Please Don't Go (Back for Seconds)
  • Wango Tango (Mango Fandango)
  • Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (Insert Your Own Joke Here)
  • Yank Me, Crank Me (You’re the Best Personal Trainer Ever!)
  • Homebound (Got No Business Going Out to Eat)
  • Give Me Just A Little (Dessert)
I put it all together, but then got sidetracked by a bunch of Ted Nugent facts. I had no idea the guy was such a whack-job. Apparently the rock-and-roll legend has kind of reinvented himself as an archconservative, conservationist family man.

  • His book Ted, White, and Blue made it onto the Top 10 of The New York Times Bestseller List in its first week.
  • He played Skunk Tarver in the 2008 film, Beer For My Horses as Skunk Tarver.
  • He had a relationship with a 17-year old Hawaiian girl when he was 30. He became her legal guardian in order to comply with laws regarding relationships with minors.
  • He is on the board of directors of The National Rifle Association, although he usually goes hunting with a bow and arrow. He eats everything he kills.
  • Nuge's take on free-range chicken, from his book Kill It and Grill It: “Free-range chicken ain’t free and that ain’t no range. Venison is free-range. Pheasant is free-range. The almighty Ruffed Grouse is free-range. I’m free-range. Chickens are incarcerated. . . . If it can’t get away, it ain’t free-range and I ain’t interested.”

So now I know all these interesting facts about the Motor City Madman. I even know that Nugent’s nickname is the “Motor City Madman.” Google makes it easy to find all these facts, but I can’t say it’s always a time-saver; I spend hours going down crazy paths and nonsensical by-ways while on my searches.

Maybe what I’ll do is use Google to find a good set of World Book Encyclopedias to use instead of Google from now on. I think I won’t waste so much time if I go back to the old-school set of books.

Plus, we’ve got a lot of spiders.

x

26 comments:

  1. You've got a vivid imagination, Mr Sh*t.

    Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (waiting for the big bang)

    Nuge is in his own universe, that's for sure.

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  2. Happy Saturday from a fellow-Google lover.

    I had the same love for our encyclopedias when I was a kid. So, I just picked up a (newish) used set for my boys from Freecycle this summer.

    Sadly, it hasn't broken their Google addiction.

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  3. A Googol is the square root of a Caloogol - the number of calories I'd eat in a typical day "BB" (Before Blogging)

    I'm waiting for JackSh*t's World of Weight Loss
    Encyclopedia....

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  4. I am a googler. I use it daily. I love the app on iPhone that you speak into the phone and it googles it for ya...cool!

    :)

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  5. Another interesting fact about Ted Nugent and his opinion of fat people:

    http://escapefromobesity.blogspot.com/2008/10/fat-haters.html

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  6. We read a book about googol/googolplex in our homeschool a couple years ago. I had never heard the term and my husband was horrified at that.

    I use Google every single day. Sometimes I stray and use another search engine, but Google is my favorite.

    Ted Nugent is one strage fellow. I remember watching an interview about the death of his dog. It was his dog's time, and rather than taking him to the vet, he let the dog run--and shot him while he was running.

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  7. I'm off to Google Ted Nugent, because apparently I've been living under a rock all my life. Oh wait, the rock is called Africa!

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  8. Sometimes I think Google brings out the undiagnosed ADHD or Bi-polar mania in us. We can move so easily from one subject to another and no one seems to care. It's quite therapeutc at times. It gets the maddness out for a bit.

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  9. mr. sh*t you are a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, dipped in a mystery,,LOL>

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  10. It's so true you can find yourself just about anywhere online with a few clicks lol. But I did find all your Ted talk interesting. He was on a show I watch (Anthony Bourdain) and I found him quite crazy but very passionate about what he believes.

    It really does amaze me how you bring your thoughts together for your blog posts. I keep wondering what you do for a living lol.

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  11. Plus, we’ve got a lot of spiders.

    LMAO That part cracked me up the most. Im silly, I know.

    Yes, what DO you do for a living?

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  12. OK, you are too dang funny! Yank me, crank me.. I was not thinking personal trainer BUT my mind works in weird ways!!! :-) Loved this!

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  13. I'm stuck on the spiders...I can only assume you used the encyclopedias to kill them. I hate spiders, and killed a huge one last week.

    Other than that, I actually laughed out loud when you said "when I was a young sh*t."

    Hope you're having a good weekend.

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  14. I know Ted Nugent is a whack job, but I still love him (and I am a left wing treehugger :D). When I was a teenager, he used to participate in an offroad desert race near my home town.

    One time my friends and I chased him down on his dirt bike (we were on them too) and got his autograph. Somewhere I still have that dollar bill with Ted Nugent scratched across it :D

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  15. Seriously, he couldn't have just waited until she was 18?

    My, do I love Google.

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  16. Hilarious! What a weirdo that Nugent turned into.

    Horace Sh*t, too funny. What's your moms name?

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  17. I loved our worldbook encyclopedias that my teacher dad bought us when i was a kid. i always looked at the pictures of cats and dogs, and decided that hairless cats were one of the strangest things i had ever seen.
    First time reading - tres entertaining!

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  18. I got me a bad case of Fat Pants Fever! I too loved the Horace Sh*t and young sh*t lines, LOL.

    The closest thing our kids have now to a whole set of WBEs is the complete series of Ripley's Believe it or Not books. Not quite the same, but for the sort of things an 8 year old wants to Google, Ripleys' is pretty good.

    BTW, did you whack the spiders with the encyclopedias or smash them inside the pages or what?

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  19. Now you are in my wheel house...love the homage to the Nuge...

    You know I am a gun nut, so me and Ted share the love of the outdoors, hunting and fishing. I failed at my rock and roll god thing though...but I am still working on it.

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  20. BTW congrats on your 400th follower, great post as always

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  21. You're just now finding out what a whack job Ted is?? Geez Jack...catch up. :)

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  22. um, so now I've got to google Ted Nugent....

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  23. I truly believe that the Internet is the modern-day rabbit hole originally written about in Alice in Wonderland. It's so easy to get distracted. There have been times when I couldn't get my internet to work. I think it was God's way of telling me to quit surfing and start writing.

    Ted Nugent is a crazy son of a gun.

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  24. lary and sergy a really lucky and could be worlds richest man soon

    ReplyDelete

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