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.

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