(We’re going to get back to serious intellectual thoughts soon, we promise.)

Advertising Age blog (Bob Garfield):

“Coolness, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Exactly one blogger, a college student named Suze Bramlet, used “coolest thing ever” in the same thought with “Birkenstocks.” Nobody in the blog universe did so with Carrot Top. But the pool of cool is predictably deep: Librarything.com, Google Earth, Google Ride Finder, BenGay, Pandora; the Diet Coke and Mentos video; tennis and the fact that nurse sharks have two uteri but no placenta.”

Let’s dig deeper. I decided to take advantage of my old school friend Kevin Shay‘s Google API Proximity Search (GAPS)*, asking for the number of pages that include “cool” and the terms below within three words of each other.

Google Earth – 134,100
Pandora – 65,730
Mentos – 15,632
LibraryThing – 390
Birkenstocks – 271
Nurse sharks – 114
Google Ride Finder – 76
BenGay – 24

Kevin is the author of the humor piece “Pirate Riddles for Sophisticates” (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, 6/14/00):

Q: Of which concept shared by Jungian psychology and Northrop Frye’s literary theory are pirates especially fond?
A: ARRRchetype.

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