WITH THE INVENTION OF GOOGLE, there’s little I am forced to commit to memory, and as I near 50, I am both thankful for this and irritated by it.
While there’s fun in idle Google searches—lyrics of popular songs from the 1970s, the number of pence to sterling pound, the definition of octothorpe (#)—I’m not doing my brain any favours.
For example, a few months back, while watching the credits roll on a television program I noted the name “Vince van Patten,” who, if my 1970s recollection was correct, is the son of the actor who played the dad, Tom Bradford, in Eight is Enough, and the sister of Joyce van Patten. Or was he the nephew of Joyce van Patten?
Wait a minute, was Joyce sister of, or wife to, Dick van Patten? My memory tangled fact with fiction, so I checked online and soon learned that Joyce married Martin Balsam and gave birth to Talia Shire.
Soon, I was googling other actors, and learned that Cole Hauser, who always looked familiar to me, is the son of Wings Hauser (most notable in my memory as Greg in Y&R).
A third search failed to find a connection I once read about in a magazine between Brad Pitt and Rip Torn (cousin to Sissy Spacek), but maybe it was Rip Taylor (“Charles Elmer “Rip” Taylor, Jr.”).
If getting off topic in conversation is annoying, getting off track with Google searches is entertaining. Despite the volume of trash online, looking up trivial facts makes for a fun past time.
On Christmas Eve last year, a small group of close friends shared a few drinks, and laughs, at a neighbour-friend’s house, replete with snacks and seasonal sweets, and eggnog. The inevitable debate about making eggnog from scratch instead of pouring it out of a carton turned on its head when someone asked about the spice sprinkled on the drink’s foamy top. Was it nutmeg, or cinnamon? It smelled like cinnamon. Yes, it was, confirmed by the hostess. It is supposed to be made with cinnamon.
Never mind what you believe, we chided, let’s Google it! We put the hostess’ daughter to work on her iPhone. Within seconds, we had our answer: nutmeg. Nutmeg!
Throughout the night, we continued to pester her with inane, frivolous research requests.
Without the instant answers provided by Google, we could have continued to tease the hostess for the rest of evening about her inadequate knowledge, so knowing the answer took some of the fun out of our conversation.
Both the good news and the bad news about awesome Internet Search Engines is that as we age, we don’t have to rely on our fading memories. This might make us lazy, but there’s not much room upstairs in the old noggin for trivial information such as familial relationships between actors and other assorted Hollywood types, or traditional cocktails.
Besides, all my memory (RAM—random-access memory, if you will) is being used for memorization of the dozens of passwords I need to get through daily life: garage door, security access code for office, computer sign-on credentials, PIN for bank card. And I can’t Google those.