Not capoeira or Hortus

Every once in a while I check out the Google Labs to make sure they haven't gone evil yet.

Evil? No. Perhaps a tad 'tarded? Yeah, maybe. I looked into Google Video...

...and found nothing. To use this service, you have to install the Google video viewer. My evil radar was on and I was not going to install it, until I saw that it was a GNU variant of video software. I trust GNU, open source will never be evil.

After you install the viewer, you can search for things that may have been said on television or something. It is searching through the closed caption text, I guess. So, if you type "monkey", you find out where this word has recent been said, or sung, on television.



So, when I typed this, Animal Planet had a show 30 minutes ago. Also, apparently Elvis Costello is singing about monkies on Austin City Limits on PBS. Yeah, this is really useful. Now if m had designed this software, it would have shown file footage of a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette or something.

So, can you actually watch any of these clips? Well, sure, as long as Google has permission. I thought that I could at least see C-SPAN or something, but even BookTV is off limits. No worries, though, Google has some suggested search words to find video. Some very specificl words, like: Greenpeace, AdWords, badminton, PS3, cattlemen, Hortus, sarong, breakdancing, or capoeira.

Yeah, so, if you had your pick, which one would you look at? You correctly chose "badminton," didn't you. By searching Google Video for badminton, you are graced with the Summer 2004 Olympics double bronze finals between Denmark and Indonesia. (Yes!)

I refuse to look into "capoeira." I actually remembered what this was, since it was made fun of in "Meet the Fokkers." (Save your blockbuster coupon on that one.) Otherwise, I only knew this as the crazy martial arts/slash/dancing technique in Brazil, because the slave-owners outlawed real martial arts in the eighteenth century, or something. (Thanks to a CNN video from 1994 for teaching me about that.)

I will admit that I didn't know what a "hortus" is. Don't worry, it's just some dude in a flower garden.

--gh