Monday, February 2, 2009

Did you mean...

The power is back on! This evening, I was able to hop on the web and get caught up on Battlestar Galactica. I watch a couple of shows this way, but mostly watch movies from Netflix. With no electricity at home last week, this wasn't really an option, so I ended up doing a lot of reading. On Friday I went to stay at my Dad's house, and at that point I went back to watching movies! Reading was very fun though -- I think I have now read most of the books I got last Christmas.

Last year, I kept track of all of the books I read and all of the movies I watched. I kept them on a web page with links to their Wikipedia entries when they existed. When I visit random Wikipedia pages, I try to make any obvious corrections to the pages, and also learn neat things sometimes. For example, apparently Water for Elephants was first drafted during NaNoWriMo. On last year's lists, movies seriously outweighed books. This year I am keeping the same lists and, due to the power outage, books are at least catching up.

I only brought a few books with me to my Dad's house, so ended up downloading a few free random ebooks on the iPhone through Stanza. One of them had a silly title: The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death. I went to find the Wikipedia entry for it, so just did a search for:
the idiot girl and the flaming tantrum of death
No hit -- it is not too surprising that the book doesn't have an entry, but what was surprising was when the search results asked:
Did you mean: the idiot girl and the flaming tantoo of death
What?? Would there really be hits for that instead? I clicked, and...
Did you mean: the idiot gil and the fleming tango of death
Oh of course, that makes a lot more sense! So I clicked, and...
Did you mean: the idiot gill and the fleming tang of death
Hehe. So I clicked, and...
Did you mean: the idiot gill and the flying tank of death
Now we're getting somewhere! So I clicked, and...

This one actually got two search results: List of Doctor Who villains (exactly what it sounds like) and Corner Gas (a Canadian sitcom). Neither contain that exact phrase, unfortunately, though they do have all those words in them. Search engines are cool.