Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Good at google


It may be partly due to the fact that I am very bad at coming up with one-liners but often a piece of dialogue from a book or a movie stays with me and I am left wondering how someone could come up with something that funny, or interesting (or in some cases, that dumb).

I have noticed that certain dialogues (probably) mean a lot more than what the writer intended. And sometimes they end up meaning the exact opposite. What immediately comes to my mind is Diane Keaton saying "I am good at google!" (in "Mad Money") to the person at the Employment Office who simply dismisses it with a oh-yeah-that-will-get-you-a-job stare; I guess the writer (and the entire crew) didn't realize that being "good at google" is actually a big deal.

I have seen several people struggle while searching for very simple things and they weren't computer illiterate or anything - they were just "bad at google". One classic example that instantly comes to my mind is my friend spending hours at google trying out several combinations of "two snakes winding around a knife logo" to get to caduceus (and I am really not making that up - my friend till date is called "paambu" aka snake for trying to bring down the google server with such search queries). Her wanting to use the caduceus as a medical logo (instead of the rod of Asclepius) was also funny but that would be a different rant.

Being a student and having to use several other databases and indexes apart from just Google, I guess it is pretty important that you have excellent "search-and-find" skills - which is probably why I retained this funny little piece from a rather forgettable movie.

Anyways, I will probably be posting some such interesting pieces of dialogues that I come across from now on, although for certain movies (like say Knocked up, or Juno, or even Jab We Met) it would probably end up being a pretty long post!

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