OMG, It's Elisabetta Canalis' boyfriend! Image from Wikimedia.

Part of what I do on a daily basis is keep track of what people are Googling. I always find the mixture of hot topics interesting and usually amusing, and I’ve always kind of wanted to write a “Google Trends roundup” type thing. So instead of writing a whole bunch about one popular topic, I’ll just write a little bit about a few topics and see how people like it. I would very much appreciate comments with your feedback.

I’m sad to report that “military payday loans” and “no fax loans” never appear among the most popular search terms, otherwise I’d probably make more money. The most popular topic on the Internet today, by far, is Obama’s school speech. The most-searched term at the moment is “Obama school speech video,” which I happen to have right here for your viewing pleasure:

Elisabetta Canalis photos

Whenever the president gives a big speech, it’s always very popular on Google. Otherwise, there are sometimes political search terms that sporadically pop up here and there. One thing you can always — always — count on, though, is that people will be looking for pictures of women.

Specifically, people will search for pictures of the newest, hottest, most scantily clad female celebrity who is a celebrity specifically because she is hot and scantily clad in photos. Today, Elisabetta Canalis photos are right up there with Obama’s school speech as far as popularity goes. Elisabetta Canalis was a D or maybe E list celebrity until she started dating George Clooney. For Elisabetta Canalis photos, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Hey, I recognized that people are always searching for scantily clad ladies. That doesn’t mean I have to aid them.

AP Poll college football

Season opening games are fresh in the minds of college football fans, and everyone is checking out the AP Poll college football rankings to see how their teams fared in the eyes of the professional sports analyzers.

Sports are always all over the popular search terms list, so this is no surprise. I always imagined that if I started a blog called “Celebrities, death and sports” or something along those lines, it’d be very popular. Want to see how your team did on the AP Poll college football rankings? I can do better than that ESPN College Football has the AP, USA Today and ESPN polls.

King brothers Wiki

Sometimes even we mere mortals can confuse and befuddle the Great Google Robot. A popular search term right now is “King brothers wiki,” which will lead you right to Wikipedia entries about The King Brothers, a popular ’50s Brit pop trio as well as a modern-day American rock duo.

Of course, people are actually searching for the King brothers who were featured on Dateline last night. The 21 and 22-year-old boys killed their father when they were 12 and 13 years old. At the time, they were the youngest suspects ever to be tried for murder as adults. Get details and a video on the King brothers on Good Morning America at The Huffington Post.

To read up on another popular trend, check out my earlier post on Jon Gosselin on “Good Morning America.”

Red White and Blue Ice Cream cake? Yes, please!

Everyone is trying to get on All Recipes, at allrecipes.com, all at once. That’s great for business for All Recipes, but not so great for people who need, you know, recipes.

So here are some other really big recipe databases you can go to instead. Just as you can get military payday loans from lots of different sources through Personal Money Store, you can get great recipes from lots of different web sites. To possibly save you a trip, I’ve included some great Fourth of July recipes right here as well.

Recipe Zaar

Recipe Zaar, at www.recipezaar.com is up and running smoothly and has some Fourth of July recipes highlighted right at the top, including pork chops and honey grilled chicken.

Here’s a simple recipe for steak lovers out there:

Peppered Steak with 5 Star Gourmet Steak Sauce

Epicurious

Epicurious, at www.epicurious.com, has some really great Fourth of July recipes, especially if you’re looking for something out of the ordinary. Making a flag cake is very popular Fourth of July dessert solution. But doesn’t Red, White and Blue Ice Cream cake sound a bit more delicious?

This recipe from Epicurious says to make  your own sorbet, but I am recommending you ignore that part and just buy some blueberry and strawberry sorbet and lemon ice cream. Of course, if you want to make your own frozen treats, the recipes are on Epicurious.

Red White and Blue Ice Cream Cake

• Simply Strawberry Sorbet
• 3/4 cup cookie crumbs (process 7 Newman’s Own Organic O’s — creamy fillings and all — in the food processor until finely ground) or finely chopped candied ginger
• One recipe Lemon Ice Cream with Candied Lemon Peel
• One recipe Simply Blueberry Sorbet
• Freshly whipped cream, fresh berries, and sprigs of mint, for serving

Preparation

Place a 9-inch springform pan in the freezer until very cold, at least 1 hour.

Make the strawberry sorbet (or beat premade, frozen sorbet until smooth in an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment). Remove the springform pan from the freezer and immediately scoop in the sorbet. Working quickly, use the back of a spoon or an offset spatula to smooth the sorbet into an even layer, approximately 1 inch high. Sprinkle evenly with 1/4 cup cookie crumbs or candied ginger, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and freeze until firm, at least 1 hour.

Repeat the process with the lemon ice cream and another 1/4 cup of crumbs or candied ginger, freezing 1 hour. Finish with the blueberry sorbet, topping with the last 1/4 cup of crumbs or candied ginger. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and freeze until set, at least two hours or overnight.

Chill a serving plate or cake stand in the freezer.

Just before serving, unmold the cake: Warm the blade of an offset spatula or knife in hot tap water, then wipe it dry. Run the blade around the inside edge of the pan, then unlock and remove the sides. Place the chilled plate or cake stand upside-down on top of the cake pan and flip everything over so the cake is resting on the plate. Rewarm the knife and gently edge it between the bottom of the pan and the cake to remove the bottom of the pan. Garnish with a mint sprig and serve with whipped cream and fresh berries.

All Recipes not created equal

Doesn’t that cake just sound way too good? If you want more alternatives to All Recipes, here are a few more:

• $5 Dinners
• Betty Crocker
• Martha Stewart
• Rachael Ray
• Tyler’s Ultimate

Jill Sobule rose to widespread popularity in 1995 with her song “I Kissed a Girl,” supplemented by her contribution to the “Clueless” soundtrack, “Supermodel.”

Unfortunately, the mainstream media hasn’t heard much from her since then. However, now she is back in the spotlight because of her most recent album, “California Years.”

Accepting donations

It’s not the music on her new album that’s receiving all of the attention, although Public Radio International says her latest release “has a full quota of her witty pop songs.”

Jill Sobule’s album has garnered international attention because of the way she paid for it. No, she didn’t use military payday loans in the U.K. She paid to record, market and distribute “California Years” with donations from her fans.

Jill Sobule explains it all

An article from Public Radio International says when Jill Sobule got fed  up with working with a record company, she came up with a way to produce an album without one. Jill Sobule explains her strategy:

“It’s not a huge, huge fan base, but it’s a mighty fan base.  They are very loyal, and I think part of it is because I always write back.”

She sent an email to her fans and asked, “What do you guys think about becoming my record company?”

There was some strategy involved from the start.  “First, I had to think about how I would do it because I didn’t want to say, ‘Just give me money,’ it had to be in return for something, sort of gifts and services.”

Telethon not included

Jill Sobule describes her strategy as “very public radio.” In exchange for donations, she offered her fans items including mentioning them in the CD liner notes, showing up at their houses to play them songs and writing theme songs for individuals who donated $1,000.

“The best one was — this was a total joke; I didn’t think it would happen — ‘weapons-grade plutonium, where you get to sing on my record.  A woman came in from the U.K.  She did a bang-up job, I must say.”

Bringing in the big bucks

In all, Jill Sobule raised $75,000 in fan donations. She says she spent about half on recording the album and hiring a producer and half on marketing, publicity and distribution — things a record company usually funds.

Getting out from under a record label means Jill Sobule won’t have to split her profits, follow restrictions or demands set by the label or go through a label when planning her tour. Jill Sobule was happy with her newfound freedom, but says getting away from a record company didn’t fully eliminate stress:

Even though she wasn’t “working for the man” in recording this album, Sobule says that there was a different kind of pressure.  “For the most part, it was better.  The scary part was you better make sure that the people who donated, liked it.  It was way more intimidating than ‘working for the man.’”

Sometimes, I wonder why people Google certain things. Often the top search terms that appear on Google Trends are related to breaking political, economic or entertainment news. But sometimes, the results are simply surreal. Like parts of this article.

Yes, I’ll admit that I’m not watching the Today show, Dr. Phil, Oprah or Regis and Kelly. People are watching those programs while seated at their computers. They’re searching for subjects brought up on those shows; I get that. But what is it that has drawn the attention of the online public to Salvador Dali’s class surrealist painting “The Persistence of Memory?”

Sure, you can take a look at it online and understand that time is ephemeral, but that doesn’t solve your budget-busting issues. An online payday loan (or military payday loans if you are so inclined) will not melt. They will persistently boost your bottom line when the bottom threatens to drop out of your corrugated sailing shingle of waxwork, your linguine razor at the ready for encounters with overdraft mavens of monkish solemnity. Fish fall from the iPhone; log, rinse and rephrase your seven-year financial itch plan. Be a responsible flounder.

Dali persists

Paul Simon saw angels in the architecture, Christopher Hume of The Toronto Star sees the surreal in the shelter hulks surrounding our solitary, shambling flesh villages. Dali and the surrealists had a great influence on the art form of buildings. Is it purposeful? Is it accidental? Barcelona is known in no small part for the architecture of Antonio Gaudi, whose melting churches and muezzin Moor structures sing the charms of a great city. Yet Paris, which is considered the “Mother City” of surrealism, stands as rational as the Arc de Triomphe and majestic as the Eiffel Tower. Few irrationalities melt the landscape like butter love. It splashes at random on Mexico City, Mumbai and beyond, so you see it’s difficult to find a coherent surreal plan among the architecture angels. But that could be part of the plan.

Toronto, writes Hume, appears on the surface to be far from a hotbed for surrealism. But the odd juxtapositions make for a varied landscape. “High-Anglican Gothic” and post-war modern slammed together with the rugged Canadian landscape to create an outwardly searching mix. That’s one side of it, but “starchitecture” projects with a dash of the surreal (as Hume puts it) also define the city. Spiral staircases leave buildings on their way to the stars. Daniel Libeskind’s “crystals” of glass and aluminum and glass from walls speak to the brain from the unconscious quarry. And then there’s Will Alsop’s flying tabletops that pay duties to the memories of M.C. Esher.

Irrational civic enterprise

Sometimes, a certain persistence of memory applies to the tiny public spaces of Hume’s city. Order is on the edge of melting, but it won’t go away. It may change beyond recognition, but it’s there. The reporter mentions “the north side of Charles St., east of Yonge, beside the entrance to 30 Charles,” where there is an opening to no place in particular (unless that is your destination to begin with). Follow the trail in no particular way and you’ll stand upon a concrete platform with a bike encircled by towers.

What is happening in this space? It’s leftover, it’s nothing, it’s something particular. It is certainly deliberate. The bike will remain so long as the towers stand and our own persistence of the memory erects barriers of reason. We give the bike purpose, yet wonder persistently at just how still a still life can be when invisible pelicans transport potential energy in their bills and laws.

Leaving Toronto

Hume’s persistence of memory for his local landscape leads him just outside to Mississauga next. “An empty sunburnt landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope,” he calls it. “Marilyn Monroe” twin condos sashay across the street from the “metaphysical” city hall. The ladies bring their feminine swerve with no reserve, breasts, hips and thighs to the sky. Mississauga City Hall, wings about to take flight, spires and postmodern bracing against the persistence of memory for all things boring, is about angles rather than curves. They’re sexy buildings, daring buildings, far from utilitarian.

Mississauga was built fast, writes Hume. It has little persistence of memory on its own, as it has had no time to sit back and ponder itself. “There’s less occasion for the conscious mind to intervene and the results are closer to the irrational impulses the surrealists celebrated,” he writes.

Of madelines and amygdalas

Enough about Toronto. The vehicle being driven here is a V8 Dali, complete with vitamins, minerals and nasal-labial exodus that stir our imaginations. We feel the Persistence of Memory in different ways. But the common thread is emotion. Marcel Proust in “Swann’s Way” testifies to taste and smell

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

What triggers us? What floats our boat? Google searchers know that the amygdala is involved. Significant research points to the connection between the emotion centers of the brain (like the amygdala) and memory… Proust knew (and scientists know) that memory and emotion cannot be separated. From the scientists:

The amygdala and hippocampal complex, two medial temporal lobe structures, are linked to two independent memory systems, each with unique characteristic functions. In emotional situations, these two systems interact in subtle but important ways. Specifically, the amygdala can modulate both the encoding and the storage of hippocampal-dependent memories. The hippocampal complex, by forming episodic representations of the emotional significance and interpretation of events, can influence the amygdala response when emotional stimuli are encountered. Although these are independent memory systems, they act in concert when emotion meets memory.

Feelings are a persistence of memory

The unconscious mind takes the lead in how memories serve us. In pleasure, pain and utility (or a combination of these elements), persistence of memory is anything but rational. Rationality is a tool we can choose to wield, but the mind resists absorbing it within. The way is shut like a injunction between sperm and seed. In order to accept the surrealism that shapes us, we must accept the power of the unconscious mind. It’s a rational transaction in an other irrational chain of life for us organisms scratching a life here. Oh, an online payday loan and military payday loans are also rational choices. But what life can throw at us is frequently irrational, so we must be persistent in applying the best tools available to surmount choirs and choirs of trouble. It’s what Salvador Dali did in his life, even when the persistence of memory would melt and decay. He chronicled the cycle of degradation and survival.

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