Google offered a temporary service this week where for $3 they would research and answer a question for you. My co-worker Nick, being an early adopter and devout disciple of Google, was keen to try it out (it was he who first discovered that Google is indeed god).

Armed with a fine question and a credit card we humbly asked of Google, “What is the story of Tom Joad from Bruce Springsteen’s song The Ghost of Tom Joad?”

A few days later, Google replies:

Bruce Springsteen’s song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” is based on John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

Tom is the main character in the book, which details the journey of migrant laborers from Okalahoma to California and all the troubles they endured.
For a summary of the book, visit:

http://cerebia.tripod.com…
http://www.awerty.com…
http://www.ac.wwu.edu…

Lyrics to “The Ghost of Tom Joad”:
http://www.english.upenn.edu…

and include this humourous disclaimer:

Please Note: The foregoing information is derived from the Google search engine or other public reference sources and is provided to assist in your searching. It has not been verified, however, and we do not represent that it is accurate, correct, complete, reliable, or otherwise valid. In other words, the information is provided “AS IS”, with no warranties whatsoever. Google expressly disclaims all express, implied, and statutory
warranties, to the fullest extent permitted by law. And under no circumstances shall Google be liable due to your use or misuse of the information provided herein.

We are impressed and incedentally recommend you listen to The Ghost of Tom Joad (either Bruce Springsteen’s original or Rage Against the Machine’s very original cover).

Sloan’s new album, Pretty Together will be released on October 9th. In the meantime enjoy the first single, If It Feels Good Do It (RealAudio).

From the URL of the new single (http://vikrecordings.com/sloan/) it looks as if Sloan is on a new record label.

A fine redesign has gone down at Peter Rukavina’s Reinvented.net.

The site is always a good read, but chilli-in-a-bread-bowl lovers will be particularly pleased with the recent rash of fine Tim Horton’s coverage.

Google is a fantastic system. Its principles are elegant in their simplicity and the technology actually works (few companies can claim both of these attributes simultaneously).

A co-worker of mine has a theory that Google is the new god. He points out that while god tends to be vague and require patience of his followers, Google gives straight answers. Google is truly without gender, unlike god, who claims to be, but is clearly a man. In a loose humanist manner, Google, as the window to the collective knowledge of humanity (if you could bestow such a title on the web), is a reflection of god in ourselves.

Up to this point in history, god has had a monopoly on judgment. Now, though, instead of thinking twice about your questionable actions in light of potential eternal damnation, you must think twice about committing your words to the permanent Google record. Google records all. Google remembers all (even after it’s gone from the original site).

For example, if I make a comment on this site about my workplace and a client searches for information on my company, they will likely find my comments. Everywhere I post a comment on the web and use my real name (which I most often do) I leave a mark that can easily be found by a future employer.

Google is god and big brother and I love it.

Is Topher Grace the new Michael J. Fox?

• Kellogg’s Vector cereal lists vitamin B12 prominently on the back of the box implying (indirectly) that it is a source of B12. A closer look reveals that the cereal itself contains no B12, but if you have it with milk, your milk will have B12 in it.
• When you log into Hotmail the first page you see is a page full of other Microsoft services with a small link to your Inbox. The Inbox should be the first page.
• Car salesmen. I know this is a tired cliché, but the jackass at the local Mazda dealership was so bad my sister almost bought a car she knew wasn’t as good just to avoid giving him the business.
• Another tired cliché: sensational journalism. In the last week I have seen two CNN on-air personalities desperately trying to extract exaggeration from a medical specialist and computer specialist on the West Nile Virus and the Code Red virus, respectively.
• Matt in Montreal to see Radiohead.

Thank you for humouring me.

I’m not sure what category you would file this “news” item under. Human Interest maybe? Regardless, MSNBC bring us the hard-hitting infotainment* piece Clearer Pictures: The coming high-defenition TV revolution.

The interactive feature fails in its aim of selling HDTV to the masses and points our a few humorous points along the way. First, that the term “High Definition” is relative and as a result meaningless. Second, illustrated through their handy TV-Resolution-through-the-years Flash presentation, they show that TV quality, including the “upcoming revolution” of HDTV, has stayed remarkably similar since 1936.

Anyone who has a 5 year old $3000-turned-$150 computer will not be impressed by 10% improvements over decades. We demand yearly improvements in order of magnitude.

Working hard today with my good people Nick and Isaac, the heat and humidity swayed the discussion away from our work and towards the great topic of animal movies. The discussion started with my bad impersonation of Hank Azaria’s hilarious Spanish accent in American Sweethearts (a terrible movie, btw, oddly full of Home Alone-style crotch injury humour).

So it began: Speaking of bad movies… Nick claims to have once watched MVP: Most Valuable Primate and House Party featuring Kid ‘n Play in one night. A debate ensued over which sport the athletic primate in MVP played; baseball or hockey. A trip to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) proved Nick to be correct, it was an ice-bound chimp who, according to the cover image “…Skates a little faster… Shoots a little harder… And is driving everyone Bananas!“

Isaac and I, sure we had seem that monkey playing baseball, were perplexed. I was convinced that Charlie Sheen had starred opposite a sporting primate.
Nick claimed I was thinking of Emilio Estevez. This lead to a theory that Emilio Estevez was a clone of Charlie Sheen produced for the comedy classic Men At Work, which nick claims to have seen twice.

Isaac assured me that it wasn’t Sheen (or his clone), but the guy from Friends. Back to the IMDB where a search for Friends points us to Matt LeBlanc, whose resume includes Ed, a monkey baseball movie which boasts “Minor league. Major Friendship.“

Other amazing facts learned from IMDB:

• There was a three sequels to Air Bud (the basketball-dog movie): Air Bud: The Golden Reciever, Air Bud: World Pup, and Air Bud IV: Seventh Inning Fetch.
• There is an MVP II.
• Kid ‘n Play is actually Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, respectively.
• 
  Animals don’t get listed in the credits (so we can’t tell if the Ed is actually the same monkey as the Most Valuable Primate).

Aside from hysteria caused by photos of monkeys in sports uniforms, this little conversational aside brought a few other issues to light. First, that the IMDB is a fantastic website. You can search by actor, director, producer, movie, etc. More importantly, it became clear that instead of ‘building powerful web based solutions’ as we do so well, we should be a think-tank, paid to play Mario Cart and extract humour from the mundane.

A link found on MetaFilter pointed me to MSNBC’s The Week in Pictures. There are some interesting photos and they have an archive that goes back three years. Unfortunately, their JavaScript-based navigation makes it difficult to link to individual photos.

A couple of photos that caught my eye: 1 & 2.

The crew at design portal k10k.net (aka Kaliber10000) are taking the summer off. Good for them and thanks for the fine animated jakob nielsen.