How I Met Your Mother

Looking at the ‘Stats’ section of this blog I can see that by far the most viewed post is ‘How Loud is the Sun?’ Amazingly, any overly curious individual who types this into Google (or even Bing – God, do I even want that audience?) gets my blog as the first hit.

Being momentarily bereft of ideas for a new post I thought I’d bow to the collective will of humanity as expressed through Google (a sentence that may hopefully be used to describe some sort of internet-based fascist regime that could emerge in the near future). Typing ‘How’ into Google and letting it (via ‘Google Instant’) finish the thought for you gives, alarmingly, a suggestion of ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ Thankfully I’ve managed to insulate myself from the dregs of popular culture to the extent that, although I know this is a comedy TV show, that’s all I know. Never watched an episode. Don’t know who’s in it. No idea what the premise is.

I’d planned to move on to some of the other popular suggestions that Google offers when presented with the beginning of a question, such as “Do… Not Call Register,” “Can… You Run It,” “How… To Make Pancakes,” “How… Do You Print Screen?” etc. but as you can see they’re all quite fantastically boring. Worse still, those examples are the more interesting ones. Letting Google finish your thoughts for you reveals an obsession with crap TV, song lyrics, computers, basic science and elementary Christianity. This may mean one of three things: 1) humanity is obsessed with this sort of tedious rubbish; 2) the subsection of humanity Googling things often enough to effect Google Instant is obsessed with this sort of tedious rubbish; or 3) Google is showing the beginnings of sentience, but rather than an artificial intelligence such as Terminator’s Skynet, intent on wiping out humanity, it is an idiot intent on buying the 8^th season (Eight?) of ‘Two and a Half Men’ and finding the lyrics to ‘Do It Like A Dude.’

The only interesting thing revealed by all this is Google’s continuing fascination with the Sun – perhaps it is evil, and questions like “How Big Is The Sun?” and “How Hot Is The Sun?” are preludes to “How To Extinguish The Sun” or “How To Plunge The Earth Into The Sun.” With luck, my blog will help it formulate its evil plans, and I will be rewarded in some sort of virtual paradise.