Google makes the world grow stupid

It's imaginary, just like your intelligence

It’s no surprise that a blog called “Run the Equator” gets the majority of its hits from people searching the web for something or other related to the Equator. I run a counter on this site which enables me to see how many people have reached it and where the clicks come from, within the limits of geographic IP address mapping. Don’t worry, the counter doesn’t tell me your name, phone number or email address, but it’s very good at measuring stupidity, and there’s no better dumbness-gauge than the words people use in web searches. Words? No, it’s entire phrases and personal questions that people ask Google these days.

The undeniable fact that Google has indexed and catalogued the entire world of online information has led certain of us to believe that the sum of human knowledge is at their fingertips and no effort is needed to retrieve it. Once upon a time it used to be that you needed to read the manual first in order to be able use a tool. If you wanted to get a book on a certain topic from the library, you had to know how to use the index cards or explain your concerns to the librarian, and later on, when you had the book in your hands you actually had to spend some time reading it to get to the information you were looking for. All this sounds pretty darn complicated, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, in the age of instant gratification all these time-wasting efforts have been made obsolete by web search. Who needs a brain when you’ve got Google?

You can get most of what you’re looking for to come willingly to your web browser, depending on your level of skill in manipulating search keywords, but no amount of search and indexing will redeem some of the lost souls who land accidentally on my blog. For their lack of common sense they deserve house arrest without access to the internet and an interdiction to procreate.

Most people get to my blog looking for something simple and objective, which can be expressed in simple queries: visas, information about a certain country or place I happen to have visited and blogged about, hostels, vaccines for the tropical world, travel information. These boring internet surfers seem to have read the manual and don’t expect the web to be able to cure AIDS and slice bread.

A few clueless dweebs, exhibiting a fair degree of anonymous honesty admit that they don’t know where or what this equator-thing is. Fair enough – in this day and age, operating a computer doesn’t require any level of formal education, like going to school. These guys seem to be struggling in a desperate quest for trivial knowledge. Unless they are 8 year-olds, they have already lost the battle and will soon land a job flipping burgers for the rest of their lives if they don’t already do so.

The frosting on the cake are those who have thrown all gray-matter from the skulls into the trash can and would rather be plugged into the Matrix than exercise their atrophied brains, the part of the population whose cortexes have been leveled with a clothes iron by the digital age. These guys ask Google the kind of questions you would ask of an oracle. One who has all the answers to all the riddles in the Universe, or at least to everything involving the Equator. Let’s take a look at the existential problems these monkeys are struggling with. Some questions require algorithmic answers, which reveals a certain complexity of the problem they are trying to tackle, but the mere fact that they ask the search question in raw, human form reveals their total lack of common sense with regard to technology and its limits. Some of them are merely stupid, others completely nonsensical, more appropriate to the prior category, many are just brilliant. The grammar belongs to them.

• do you have to pass the equator to get to Turkey
• what towns are on the equator
• countries which run through the equator
• what's the distance of istanbul from the equator
• India is as much a country as the Equator
• continents that doesn't run through the equator
• frostbite near the equator
• map of india with equator on it
• equator shit time lapse
• honduras location due to the equator
• map of thailand equator
• where does the equator run
• visa to equator
• what rivers run away from the equator
• ten countries along the equator that you fly along
• I travel around the world but always in a corner i can cross the equator but only only make one trip
• a list of all country the equator run through
• turkey spain or egypt what is closer to the equator
• lands lieng on the equator
• the capital of the country that crosses the equator
• india south of the equator
• why is the Equator famous

Those queries come from the activity logs of the last month only. Too bad I didn’t save the rest. I wanted to make a top-ten out of it but I can’t decide which one deserves the Darwin Award...

For all of you internet-indoctrinated morons, get an atlas! Google maps would do just fine.

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So you want to know what my favorite place is?

"What was your favorite place?"

How's that for an answer?

I get this question all the time and it irritates me like a knitting needle stuck in my ear. Sometimes I think you ask it just to annoy me – but you’d have to be too devious for that, so I’ll go with the more reasonable assumption: that you’re opening your mouth only to ask the most predictable question because you don’t have anything to say, really. It’s a stupid question. I’ve been to 26 countries during my year-long trip; there wasn’t a lot that they had in common except that I had to eat, shit and sleep wherever I went, and the other tourists annoyed me equally everywhere… but I hardly think that’s a solid basis for a top-ten rating.

I don’t ask you if you like steak more than ice cream. Or whether Scarlett Johansson is hotter than Angelina Jolie. Or whether you prefer beer or coffee. Those, along with the one you keep asking me are stupid questions and do not deserve to be answered. Whatever the answer may be it doesn’t communicate any relevant information and is not going to advance the conversation in any way. It’s just meaningless chatting for the sake of it.

There’s a gazillion of reasonable questions you could ask, that may lead to a funny and interesting conversation. Let me help you a bit:

• Where did you have the toughest communication experience?
• Where did you spend the most money?
• Where did you have the craziest binge-drinking night?
• Where was the best diving?
• Where did you smoke the most dope?
• Did you get laid anywhere?
• Did you have to go to the hospital anywhere?
• Did you ever get scammed by a con artist and fell for it?
• Did you get robbed anywhere?
• Did you get into a bar fight anywhere?
• Did you steal from anyone?
• Did you run naked out in the street anywhere?
• Where did you have the worst diarrhea?
• Where did you make the best friends?
• Where did you have the worst hotel room?
• What was your weirdest experience?
• Were you ever afraid for your life?

But no, you all prefer to ask me the same inane question, one that doesn’t even have a relevant answer to boot. Look, I liked all the countries I visited and I hated some of them at the same time – sometimes for the same reasons. You could figure this out on your own if you paused to think for a second before opening your mouth, but since you’re so narrow and you lack any spark of imagination you keep asking me what my favorite place was as if I were 16 and I had to have a favorite movie, a favorite band or a best friend.

I think before I speak!

I should throw the nearest wireless mouse at you when I hear that question, but I’m medicated well enough so I usually restrain myself. Instead, if I suspect that the person I’m talking to has a bit of a brain left and would be able to see the error of their ways with a bit of help or if I believe that the question was just a momentary lapse into stupidity on the part of an otherwise clever individual (don’t we all?) I’ll say that the countries I liked fall into two distinct categories: those that you fall in love with at first sight, as soon as you get off the plane - like South Africa or Greece or Spain - and those that have to grow on you, like India, Laos and Bolivia. Aside of this coarse classification each country strikes you by one or more dominant attributes that make it unique: it can be the picture-perfect beauty of nature, the ethereal strangeness of the landscape, the good time you had with people you met, the rotting garbage lying in the open, the permanent harassment you were subjected to, the beautiful wild animals, the breathtaking diving on the coral reef, the raging night-life, the hot topless girls on the beach, the soaring snow-capped mountains or the delicious exotic food. You may prefer one or the other in certain situations but no single one tops the rest; I’d have to just pick one out of my ass. Not that you would care. You want clichés? Here’s one for you: stop asking me to compare apples with pears!

Even if I had a favorite country… how would it advance your knowledge of the world if I told you anyway? Stop asking me dumb questions just to be nice. If you don’t have anything to say, just shut up. Man, I hate people.

You want a list? I got one! You order it, stop asking me.

• I loved Mexico for the soaring Mayan pyramids lost in the jungle and its cheap tacos. And because it was the first destination on our trip
• Going to Belize because going there was a childhood dream come true
• I loved Guatemala for Antigua’s beautiful ruined convents and Tikal’s army of howler monkeys who scared me to death at 4 in the morning
• I loved Honduras because the bunch of guitar-playing hippie divers I met on Roatan reminded me of another time in my life
• I loved Ecuador because that’s where my Spanish unlocked its brakes. And because I met Michael and Mor in the Galapagos
• I loved Peru for the crushing dignity of its Inca fortresses and for giving me enough diarrhea to fill a bath tub
• I loved Bolivia because it’s the underdog of South America and the Altiplano made me feel like I was on the moon
• Argentina filled my belly with the greatest steak on the planet and gave me wireless internet in every coffee shop
• South Africa had the bluest skies I’ve ever seen
• In Namibia I floundered to the on top of a giant red sand dune at sunrise and saw lions having sex
• In Botswana I followed fresh animal tracks through the savanna and saw a herd of elephants coming out of the fog
• Zambia made me famous for fifteen minutes and helped me earn $1000 in royalties
• In Malawi I kept looking for the other shore of the lake while I sipped cold beer
• Tanzania showed me a place that redeemed all ugliness in the world
• Kenya… well, I didn’t really visit Kenya but it still had the coolest song in the world
• Egypt crushed me under millennia of history and showed me that sometimes locals just want to talk to tourists without demanding money
• In Greece I realized that I could drink tap water again but I turned into a wino instead
• Italy lead me back to Rome, and for a day I was an all-powerful pasta-eating emperor. Maybe Caligula.
• Spain had scores of delicious tapas and smoky crowded bars and Gaudi and pretty girls everywhere and Robert and Eva
• Romania is still where I return when I want to remember the smell of hay and fresh snow and roasted pig-ears
• I almost had my fingers amputated by frostbite for taking my hands out of my mittens to take pictures in front of the Hungarian parliament
• In Turkey I shed a tear for the defunct Constantinople and then gorged myself with pide and baklava in Istanbul
• India overwhelmed me with unusual sensations, crushed me with its mass of humanity and got me some peace of mind, if only just for a short time...
• Thailand explained to me what the song “One Night in Bangkok” was all about
• I loved Cambodia because you cannot believe that a place like Angkor Wat really exists until you see it
• In Laos I wanted to become a bearded, balding, homeless dope-head just to forget that I had to return home and look for a job...

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