An odd ‘hit’ on the internet

I used to have a lot of trouble searching the internet for odd things – somehow every time I tried, I’d go through pages and pages of irrelevant stuff and then finally give up. I guess I wasn’t using the right key words or understanding how the search engine worked, but it just seemed so easy when Mark did it…

Anyway, I was thinking about a movie the other day – one I’d seen snatches of a few years ago and never caught again. It was on TV and I was, as usual, flipping through channels and lacking concentration. The movie was set, mid-century, on an ocean liner and had some guy playing a grand piano in an empty ballroom during a storm. He had let the piano loose from its moorings and was gliding around the ballroom on wheels as the ship tossed from side to side; in time, naturally, to the music he was playing. (Yes, I know… the bench had to be attached somehow and they aren’t usually, but that’s part of the magic of cinema…) That’s the only scene I saw. But I entered ‘movie ship piano’ into Google and, sure enough, the third listing was for the movie “The Legend of 1900” – and evidently that scene figured prominently and was described, so sure enough, it was THAT movie.

There is something magical about living in a time when such answers are at our fingertips, just for the asking. (When I was in college we had to take special training in using the research library – and it didn’t do a fraction of the job that Google can do for you!) For years important questions have gone unanswered in my life, but now I can find out anything I want to know – i.e. whatever happened to Molly Ringwald; what is a bindlestiff; where can we get New Balance cross-trainers; how much are Mariners baseball tickets; where does Bill Gates live; which Dick Francis books don’t I have… Every day, dozens of questions and instant answers.

There was a Katherine Hepburn / Spencer Tracy move (Desk Set, 1957 – see how easy it is?) about the head of a TV research department – Hepburn – pitted against a computer (designed by Tracy) that comes out badly for the computer (of course) but in MY world, the internet is king.

Which is all fine if the computer works. But 2 days ago ours crashed. All we had was the “blue screen of death.” It wouldn’t boot up at all. Resident genius Mark rolled it back and got it working again of course, but for a while there I was having a bit of a panic thinking that my next important question might go unanswered.