Saturday, January 16, 2010

"The tripel do you good"




I freely admit that I first tried Golden Monkey Tripel Ale because of:

(1) The cool name

(2) The cool logo

(3) The nearly 10% alcohol content

But I just can't drink beer unless I like it -- and I don't care how cool it sounds or looks or how much alcohol it has in it. In fact I usually don't like strong beers at all.

Last night I decided to share some of my new favorite beer with my beloved Coveners after ritual, and it met with general approval. Of course that is usually to be expected when free booze is involved!!

And the logo really is extremely cool.

Islam is .... (Or, If your search engine results were being filtered, well, how would you know?)

If you type "Christianity is" into google -- that is, without quotes, without hitting return, and with "query suggestions" turned on (the last of which should be the default) -- you will see, magically appearing, a series of suggestions, something like the screenshot to the right.

The same will happen with any string of the form "X is", where X = Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Catholicism, Wicca, Mormonism, Scientology, or Freemasonry (and possibly many others).

Jainism only yields two suggestions, as do Paganism and Seventh Day Adventism. Protestantism only yields one lonely suggestion: "Protestantism is wrong", and Pentecostalism only gives: "Pentecostalism is a cult."

The following labels, followed by "is", do not prod google to yield any suggestions at all: Caodaism, Saivism, Vaishnavism, Discordianism, Heathenism, Raelianism, Druidry, Asatru, Thelema, UUism, Antinomianism, Christian Science, scientism, spiritualism, trinitarianism, and Islam.

Islam? Yes, that's right, typing "Islam is" does not prompt google to offer up any suggestions for how to complete your search string.

wired.com ran a piece on this mystery almost 10 days ago. wired.com reporter Ryan Singel wrote that google's official explanation at that time was that “This is a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can."

I'll file this one under "P" for: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.