Ninja Librarians and Cell Phones

Okay, so, I feel like this is quickly turning into a “Products no one needs” blog, first with Nut Milk and now this… but really, I can’t be the only one who notices these things.

Would everyone here raise his or her hand if you feel you need a phone which will search the internet, your songs, your contacts, and Google maps all for the same word? No one? Okay, that confirms my suspicion. I keep seeing this commercial for Verizon’s “Droid” smart phone, and I just can’t take it anymore. It boasts a phone which can search the internet for sites about the word “Human,” find locations through Google maps with the word Human, find friends with the word Human in their name (which it admits would be weird if you had any… d’ya think?) and can also search for songs that you forgot you downloaded, with the word Human in them.

So, my question would be, what earthly purpose does this serve? On that RARE occasion when this might be useful, are we really so lazy now that we can’t just do a couple of different searches – one in music, one on the web, one in Google maps, etc.? Does it really take that much time?

Usually, though, it won’t be useful at all - I mean, when I search for something on my phone, I usually want one thing, not four or five different things which are all connected by one word. For example, let’s say I want to find a song on my iPhone by the 70’s group Starbuck. (I don’t have any, they sucked, it’s just an example.) Not only do I find the song (entitled “Everybody Be Dancin’” in case you’re wondering; again, please don’t take this as real, it could seriously damage my reputation) I also find directions to the nearest Starbuck’s on Google Maps. Oh, and look, I receive a Wikipedia article with the Character Profile of Starbuck from Moby Dick (stop giggling.) AND, I am stunned to learn that at some point I met the actress who played Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica and put her in my Contacts.

So, this is terribly useful for me if I want to drive to the nearest Starbuck’s, call “Starbuck” on the phone, and explain to her the origin of the name “Starbuck,” all the while playing some groovy “Starbuck” background music. Yeah. That seems really practical.

More often I would think it would be ridiculously annoying, like being assaulted by information you’re not really looking for. I mean, we already can barely do a simple internet search including the word “tiger” without receiving a flood of junk related to Exxon mascots and jackass golfers, when all we were really interested in was learning how many Bengals are left in Asia. Do we really need a phone that multiplies that by four? I don’t think so, but I’ve been wrong before.

If that DOES sound useful, look at it another way: imagine going to a library (one of those brick-and-mortar places with all the books that sadly almost no one uses anymore) and looking for a National Geographic article on quicksand. You’re thrilled to find the article almost immediately. But, before you can find your way out of the stacks, you find yourself suddenly buried under a pile of old Mythbusters DVDs about Quicksand, various editions of Don Quixote, and a hundred encyclopedias all containing entries starting with Q. (Don’t ask me how that would happen, I’m just saying… maybe the librarian used some crazy Ninja Librarian skills to get above you and dump them on your head….) My point is, that would be kind of like what the Droid does for you. It’s a Ninja Librarian that helps you find the 10 page article you’re looking for, then crushes you under a thousand pounds of books you didn’t want. Or something like that.