From Lifehacker: Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks, someone posted the comment, "don't forget http://www.google.com/search?q=mass+of+the+earth"
And I tried to be funny by adding, "what about
http://www.google.com/search?q=mass+of+Oprah
Apparently it wasn't funny to them since my comment wasn't approved: it seems you have to audition to comment on Lifehacker. And Oprah jokes are taboo.
[what? the woman is one of the most powerful celebrities on the planet: that alone is license to joke about her.]
You know what? Screw Oprah. Every time she announces a new favorite book, we all have to scramble around to find our dusty copies that haven't circ'ed in two years or rush orders for 25 copies for each branch so we don't have to hear all the old farts complain that we don't have this excellent book that they just heard about that was published fifteen years ago.
This just happened with The Pillars of the Earth. For some weird reason, my mom calls me and asks for me to get it for her. Normally, we discuss my day while we make some Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup together (because I still live with my mom because I'm a librarian) which is our special time because she lets me drop in the flavor "egg." Oh, you know what I love about these food company sites is when you look for nutritional information or how the mystery numbers on the package translate to an expiration date, but all you find is some page that says, "Tips" or "Helpful hints." And you click on the link and you get a page of ways to personalize your dining experience by adding ingredients to the preparation like cheese or salsa. And they treat this information like it's helping, like now they've satisfied some federal regulation to provide consumer product information. Add cheese! Fuck you. I add cheese to everything, anyway. I have shredded Colby Jack melted on my PopTarts. How about suggesting that I add a turtle? Or a tennis ball? Or shredded tin foil? I guess you should recommend that I don't add those things to be helpful, but you should have told me before I dropped Speedy into the soup.
Let me get back to hating Oprah. So my mom calls for The Pillars of the Earth and I notice that there are about ten holds on it already which for an 18 year-old book is a lot. And I asked mom where she heard about the book, and she said she just heard it was a good book. She can't name where she heard it. So two hours later, I see news that Oprah just named her latest book as The Pillars of the Earth, and I call my mom to tell her, and guess, what? Now there are about 75 people on the list. And by the next day, there are hundreds more people who suddenly need to read this book. Three days earlier, it was sitting on the shelf completely unaware of its impending notoriety. Sure, it had seen its share of the being in the spotlight, and it was stilling pulling its weight by getting into some reader's hands around 6-8 times a year. But because of Oprah, we have like 200+ copies of this thing and there are 600 people waiting to read it. So you're looking at a 2 to 3 month wait.
I can't think of another person who can create such mass-fucking-hysteria while producing nothing. She doesn't write the books: she reads them. And sometimes she peddles absolute crap. Don't even get me started on A Million Little Pieces or The Secret. At this point in her career, when she's worth $1.5-2 Billion, there is nothing she can credit to being "life altering." But yet she pushes this crap on us and we believe her. What the fuck could she ask the universe for that she doesn't already have?
On the positive side, what this says about people is that they want to read books; they just want the effort to be meaningful. Nobody wants to read a book for a week and then go, feh. So Oprah gets people to read something besides TV Guide. And for that we can thank her.
I just we weren't such zombies, following Oprah's every word. When the fifth patron calls in for the latest Oprah book and I tell her that all the copies are checked out, and she has the nerve to be surprised so that I have to explain Oprah's popularity.... "Yes, I know she just announced the book a little while ago, but she announced it to 100 million people all at once. And we only just heard about it, too, so we didn't order 200 copies last week. So yes, we just had the one copy on the shelf, so that's why there are eighty people ahead of you. Yes, I know that means it will be six-and-a-half years before you get it, but we'll try to get some more copies to keep that from happening."
Oprah isn't simply the most influential (non-Pope) person on the planet, Oprah is a fucking planet. And we are simply millions of unspectacular bodies caught in the orbit of her gravitational pull. If only Google could produce a formula to calculate her mass.
