War Vs Peace

Since my post, Happy V Sad, I've been conducting some more search engine battles, aka time wasting trials. Just search two words or phrases and see which is more popular. First I tried some phrases, the kinds of things I think people like to confess on-line -

'I'm so bored' V 'I'm so busy'

Being bored seems to be something that people like to complain about and being busy is something busy people love to tell you that they are, so I think this might be close and it is. 'I'm so bored' is the winner but only just, at 489,000 hits, to 'I'm so busy' at 453,000. But the results that I read were equally boring and it makes you wonder, if all the busy people are really so busy, how do they have time to complain about it on the internet?

'I'm so fat' V 'I'm so ugly'

'I'm so fat' gets 42 million and 'I'm so ugly' only gets 17 million, so fat beats ugly, but ugly is definitely more interesting. A teenage girl has written to an advice column called christiananswers.com, 'I find myself looking in the mirror and wondering why I have to be so ugly and have such an ugly body when all my friends are pretty and have nice bodies. Why was God unfair to me like this?' The answer she gets is, 'If being good looking is important to God, then Jesus Christ would have been a real hunk, right? But he wasn't. In Isaiah 53:2, Jesus was described this way: "In our eyes there was no attractiveness at all, nothing to make us want him." Jesus wasn't good looking, yet he rocked the world because he walked with God.'

Yeah, good point.

'I just got married' V 'I just got divorced'

Married people love to show off their wedding photos and wedding presents and lifetime supply of happiness, so I thought this was a pretty fair fight, but 'married' gets 31 million and 'divorced' gets 145 million. Turns out divorced people have a lot on their minds. This search took me to a site that sells divorce gifts and greeting cards. For 5 US dollars you can get a pack of novelty alimony cheques printed with, 'Pay to the Lying Selfish Whore, Cold Heartless Bitch and Cause of all my Pain, in the Amount of Every Last Friggin' Cent.' They also sell Ex-Husband Voodoo Dolls that come with 25 pins.

Nice.

'I love my job' V 'I hate my job'

This genuinely surprised me, 'I love my job' got just over a million hits and 'I hate my job' only got 332,000. The number one result for both searches was a site called jobvent.com, which offers 'inside information about the jobs and employers we love and hate'. I only spent a few minutes at this site but there wasn't a lot of love going around. Just for the hell of it I searched 'blowjob' and got 35 million results. Quelle surprise as the French say.

Then I moved on to the big issues -

War V Peace

I know this is not a fair match, war is loud and proud and peace is quiet and hard to find, so the result is no surprise, war gets 579 million hits, peace only gets 204 million. War kicks peace's ass.

Jesus V Obama

I thought this was going to be a good fight with an advantage to Jesus because he's been around for so long and his fans are so famously enthusiastic, but no, Jesus gets 168 million and Obama gets 215 million. Obama really is bigger than Jesus.

God V Science

For someone who may or may not exist, God gets a lot of hits at 387 million. Also someone has taken the domain name god.com. It's a Christian website that promises to answer such pressing questions as 'Why are there so many religions and which one is right?' That was posted last year but still no answer. Anyway science beats God by more than 300 million hits.

So I guess that's the end of that old argument.

Sex V Love

It's the internet, it has to be sex. But no, 'sex' gets 654 million results and 'love' gets a massive 1 and a half billion, bigger than war, sex and Jesus combined. I think Jesus would be happy about that.

Final Destination Unknown

While trying to read about the 'Final Destination' news story - an Italian woman missed the Air France flight that crashed into the ocean with no survivors, but then she was killed a couple of weeks later in a car accident in Austria - I somehow went to a site called proudzionist.com (how could I not click on it, with a name like that?). It was much more boring than it sounds, but after that I went to some site on the proudzionist blog roll, called righttracker.com, which is a directory for right-wing conservative blogs and sites. I checked a few of them out and yeah, scary. But I like how you end up at such unexpected places sometimes on-line. You might find out about something you didn't even know you were interested in, or get way too much insight into the minds of crazy people. It's like a mystery flight, destination unknown.

Superdupermarket

I'm at the supermarket choosing between six kinds of orange juice and I notice that the guy next to me is wearing one of those 'trying not to get swine flu' paper masks, that look is so over. Then I notice that not only is he buying a lot of cartons of orange juice, but he's putting each carton in its own individual plastic bag. Freakin' germ freak. He calls out to a random supermarket employee and complains that one of the juice cartons is open and they shouldn't sell it. Then he starts yelling about how he spends fifteen dollars a week on plastic bags because of things like this, and over a year that's hundreds of dollars.

I love how he blames his psychosis on the perils of open juice cartons but how could he spend fifteen dollars a week on plastic bags? They only cost a cent each or something don't they? Even if he's paying ten cents a bag, he's still going through a hundred and fifty bags a week! Maybe the germ phobia thing is just a cover and he's really just obsessed with plastic bags. Anyway, I'm riveted, he walks away and I can't decide what kind of juice I want, all I want to do is follow this guy around and I'm dying to see the inside of his house. The supermarket employee tells me that the germ guy usually comes in five minutes before they close, he buys a months worth of food, wraps every single item individually and then the poor person on the checkout has to deal with all the plastic bags and the whole procedure takes an age and they can't close the store.

I never get plastic bags, because I like totally want to save the world, but now I'm wondering if there's any point when there's people like this guy using seven thousand bags a year (if he's paying only one cent a bag, then he's using 78,000 bags a year). Maybe one day there will be an environmental militia that will take people like him away and lock them up with all the unrepentant water wasters. Oh yeah, that's me. But I have great rationalisations for my long showers, I don't have a pool, or a garden and I don't play golf or lawn bowls (golf courses and bowling greens use millions of litres of water a year). Also I find it infuriating that we're encouraged to have three minute showers but business and industry, who are by far the biggest wasters of water, aren't being forced to recycle or conserve it. Yes, I'm aware that I'm ranting and me and crazy germ guy will probably be sharing a cell and I'll have to beg him for a plastic bag to kill myself with.