90% Crud

Always on Google

My girlfriend and I are sitting in a semi-darkened theater on Thursday night. The ticket says 9:45 PM, it was now that time and we had just finished watching 10 minutes of commercials. Instead of the movie, we get an in-depth ad for Ron Howard's new movie and a great big view of Ron Howard. He is not looking good, probably because they didn't bother with makeup for what is destined to become a DVD extra.

We can't get over how bad he looks, like he's a junkie one fix away from hitting bottom. I say it must be age, figuring that Opie was in black and white so it must have been quite a while ago. She says he isn't that old. Normally this would be an impasse and we would move on.

With no interest in the Ron Howard featurette, I send an SMS saying "Ron howard age" to 46645 and get an immediate response saying

Q&A: Ron Howard Date of Birth:1 March 1954 Source www.who2.com/ronhoward.html

And yes, my phone is on silent.

Small things like that are what Howard Rheingold has been writing about for a while. If I can find out something as arbitrary as Ron Howard's birth date from somewhere as disconnected as a movie theater seat, our entire relationship to information is changing. Kudos to Google for succeeding to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."