Text Recognition

20 March, 2010 at 6:34 pm (webjunk)

The website Autocomplete Me trades on the humor generated by Google’s recent innovation of showing what other popular searches have been that began with the same keywords or letters. Said humor is mostly randomness, and a variation on the old hilarity where people would type in things like “I think [your name here] is” and then see what random internet people thought of other people with the same first name. Thrilling!

Well, perhaps not thrilling, but trifling, and trifling is what the post-MTV generation, digital natives apparently want: thirteen seconds of distraction and a link to something else. Breadth without depth.

Which is why it surprised me that so many of the screen-capped searches on Autocomplete Me are pop culture references that someone has failed to recognize and thought were gleeful randomness. Aha and haha, someone thought, it is so totally weird that anyone would ever search for that, let alone for enough people to persuade Our Google Overlords to allow an algorithm to display it as a suggested search! And then — click, click, click — it’s on display on a website that’s part of the I Can Haz Cheezburger network. Yes, I also would have thought that people as meme-aware as the LOLcats folks would catch some of these references, but apparently not.

So, for no real edification, I present a short list of Autocomplete phrases and their respective sources that I recognized. Which may well say more about my own pop culture obsessions than the limits of the site in question. Still, it should at least provide a quizzical raised eyebrow at how lack of context creates a false appearance of surreality.

• “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?”, which is from the John Cusack assassin comedy Grosse Point Blank
• “Never have children, only grandchildren”, which is a relatively well-known quotation from the slightly generationally obscure Gore Vidal
• “I mistook my wife for a hat”, which is a clear variation of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by noted doctor of neurology Oliver Sacks, popularized by his many books and his fictionalization in Awakenings with Robin Williams
• “Turtles are nature’s suction cups”, which is one of the many throwaway gags in the Raul’s Wild Kingdom segment from Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF
• “The bed that eats people”, which is a reference to the film Death Bed, made infamous by the stand-up comedy of Patton Oswalt
• “I’m so bored I’m drinking bleach”, which is from the Dead Milkmen song “The Bleach Boys” off of the 1988 album Beelzebubba
• “My hovercraft is full of eels”, which is from the “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus
• “Who can keep his head in a chicken coop the longest”, which was a challenge recorded on the television show Kenny Versus Spenny
• and, most surprisingly, “Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies”, which is perhaps one of the most-quoted lines from stand-up comedian and television personality Demetri Martin
• EDIT 22/3/10: And again today! “Without a violin playing goat” is from Notting Hill, in a scene I’ve previously remarked upon. If this keeps up, I may need to stop reading Autocomplete Me, in order to keep myself from starting a blog that’s the equivalent of xkcd sucks.