This is what the Internet was created for

Long live John Lennon and chicks with blue hair.

Wait, hear me out:

The impossible coincidence of “Shawn McCray”

I was helping a junior high student with his English homework. In an exercise to practice superlative adjectives, he had to answer questions about who he thought was the funniest actor, the greatest athlete, etc. He understood the grammar but needed help spelling the names of some of the specific people he had chosen. The problem was that his pronunciation was so garbled that half the time I couldn’t understand who he meant. For example, his favorite actor sounded something like “Asho Spin” — an American, allegedly! — but I never did figure out who that was. He couldn’t remember any of the movies “Asho Spin” had been in, either, which didn’t help.

The greatest athlete, in this student’s opinion, was “Shawn McCray,” which at least sounded more like a real name. I started putting the name as I had heard it into Google, and it suggested “Shawn McCraney.” That turned out not to be an athlete, though, but — of all things — a born-again ex-Mormon who was interviewed by John Dehlin ages ago. (I watched the interview later out of curiosity.)

The student said the “Shawn McCray” we were looking for played basketball for the Memphis Grizzlies, so I looked up that team’s roster, but none of the names were remotely similar to “Shawn McCray.” Finally I just showed the student photos of all the Grizzlies, and he pointed to the one he had had in mind: Ja Morant. I would never in a million years have guessed that that was what he was trying to say!

Here comes the impossible part. Tonight, after listening to the Shawn McCraney interview, I wondered what I’d get if I ignored Google’s suggestion and searched for what I had actually heard: Shawn McCray. The first result that came up was some rando’s Instagram.

Do you see it? There, with the caption “Shawn McCray,” is a photo of a basketball player in a Memphis jersey. My first thought was that there actually is a Shawn McCray on that team, and I’d somehow missed it. In fact, if I’d done this search with my student, I would have told him to write that Shawn McCray was the greatest athlete ever and been none the wiser.

That’s not Shawn McCray, though. It’s an Instagram post by a Shawn McCray about none other than Ja Morant.

The only reason I was searching for Shawn McCray was because that was how I had heard the student’s terrible pronunciation of Ja Morant. Then, just by chance, one of the very first search results for Shawn McCray is a photo of Ja Morant. Absolutely impossible.

Update: I actually listened to two videos about Shawn McCraney. Before the Dehlin interview, I listened to "The Shawn McCraney Collapse & C.U.L.T.," by some Christian bros who are deebly goncerned about Mr. McCraney's "damnable heresy of full preterism" and other such tedious bs. Anyway, at around the 24-minute mark, they show a clip of McCraney's show in which someone says, "I had one foot inside the brick-and-mortar church and one foot outside of it."

It turns out that Shawn McCray -- the random dude who just happened to post about Ja Morant on Instagram -- is the author of an autobiography called One Foot In One Foot Out.

Google no longer even pretends to offer millions of search results

Back in 2022, I documented how, though Google will tell you it has millions of results for your search string, it never actually lets you see more than 500.

If you try using Google now, you’ll find it still never gives you more than 500 results, but at least they’ve stopped lying about it. All fraudulent claims to have millions of results have quietly been removed.

So, uh, good job? Google: now marginally less dishonest.

Anyway, the functionality remains the same. The exact figures will vary depending on what you search for, but on average Google delivers 0.0001% search results and 99.9999% censorship. You think those numbers are exaggerated, but they’re not.

The Internet is no longer meaningfully searchable. It’s time to start relying more on serendipity and word of mouth.

That's us, blue butterfly!

As readers may remember for my May 16 post "'Come buy, come buy,' was still their cry," I have a spreadsheet that shows how many times each English word occurs in my students' textbooks, and on which pages. In that post, sorting the words on a particular page by how many times they had previously occurred in the book led to the serendipitous appearance of "come buy" (call the goblins hobbling down the glen) and the suggestion of a much longer mostly-coherent utterence.

I was recently using the equivalent spreadsheet for a different book. In this sheet, it color-codes each row according to frequency, so that words (or, rather, word-sense mappings) that appear more than 25 but fewer than 50 times in the book have an amber background. (I coded all this months ago, before "amber" had become synchronistically relevant). On Wednesday, having sorted all the words in the book by total occurrences, I noticed this:

Anything with a blue butterfly catches my eye these days, but the sync is more specific than that. In my December 7 post "The lighter and darker Morpho menelaus butterflies," I posted this image:

This features two blue morpho butterflies and the name Amber on a blue background. The spreadsheet has "blue butterfly," with the word blue on an amber background.