Funny Things I've Googled

Some might consider the things I've Googled "funny" in the sense of "peculiar." Apart from moths and butterflies, which Google used to say it considered funny things to look up, I have Googled, and still Google, all kinds of things for international clients. Some of these clients wanted things written for their local papers, about the news in their local communities, but they wanted these things written up by someone in the US or UK. I now have a policy of steering those clients to people in their countries who write good English; I didn't always know people in the appropriate countries. So I wrote about conditions in Davao and Nairobi and Singapore and all sorts of places where I've never been, as if I were sitting there.  

I really did reproach Google: "I don't need to look up hotels in Alexandria, Virginia. If I wanted to know about the hotel where I always stay, there, I'd call them. If I'm looking up hotels in Alexandria online, of course I mean Alexandria, Egypt."

But for the purpose of this week's Long & Short Reviews post I googled some things that struck me as ridiculous. 

1. Weasel Anti-Defamation League

I thought that the idea of an organization dedicated to improving the image of sneaky, stinky little beasts that eat chickens was funny. Google took it seriously. There are serious posts that accuse the ADL of using "weasel words" and there was a flap about someone calling a member of ADL a weasel. 

2.  Why Do Pigs Have Horns?

I was thinking of this as a nonsense question. Google took it seriously. Pigs do not grow horns in the way cows and goats do, but the tusks of male swine, which are teeth, technically, can be big and dangerous enough that some people call them horns. Growing big tusks is a male sex characteristic. Domestic swine usually don't have tusks because domestic male swine are usually neutered.

3. Does Tofu Need a Bicycle?

Google's top answer was robot-generated, obviously did not understand the word "tofu," and answered that "a unicycle can be used as transportation." Other answers interpreted the question as "do cyclists need tofu," and seriously discussed the place of tofu in athletes' diets.

4. How to Cook a Buick

Google tried "correcting" this to "how to cook a buck," as in deer, which is often regarded as a good meal when people aren't concerned about chronic wasting disease. 

Google's next answer was that it's possible to cook food in foil packets on the exhaust manifold of a Buick, or almost any other car. If you are taking a long road trip you don't have to depend on finding a good restaurant in a town. You can wrap some meat and veg in foil and grill them on the hot spot n your car. It's always prudent to check the internal temperature of meat with a thermometer to be sure nobody gets a raw spot, but a few hours' driving will get things cooked. 

Finally, as today's men see cooking less as "women's work" and more as "chefs' work," there are actually web sites for "Buick guys who cook." I didn't look.

5. Is a Crayon in Love with a Floppy Disk

Seeking inspiration, I looked for the objects on my shelves that sounded silliest, separately or together. Google offered no information about possible relationships between crayons and floppy disks. It pulled up a selection of sites frequented by middle-aged nerds who buy, sell, or make craft items with crayons and/or floppy disks, but not, apparently, both at the same time.

There was also some discussion of why a little drawing of a floppy disk should mean "save" in so many computer programs. It's a valid question. Hieroglyphic writing systems gave way, in societies that had them, to "demotic," phonetic writing systems that made sense to people who didn't know what someone was trying to draw but could just memorize a set of letters as symbols for sounds. The space taken up by all those little doodles and pothooks on a computer screen would just as easily accommodate words. Using words nstead of graphics would help language learners as well as making better intuitive sense.