Somebody over on the message boards pointed out that the FAQ page on this blog is one of the top hits for the Googled phrase “I love Ken.” This is interesting to me, since the phrase “I love Ken” appears nowhere on my FAQ page. And wouldn’t it be creepy if it did?

The conversation then moved on to weird search terms that have led people to posters’ respective websites. Curious, I poked around with Google Analytics a little to see what search terms had helped out my traffic over the last month. Lots of hits for “back to basics toys,” interestingly–so it looks like bad customer service is the gift that keeps on giving. Lots of people trying to figure out the answer to that stupid analogy question about frogs and dinosaurs. Surprisingly strong showings, at this late date, for “baracklash” (ahead of the curve!) and “giant ken jennings head.”

Here are a few of the odder items in the list. (Yes, I know this kind of thing is a bloggers-with-writer’s-block standby. But that’s okay because I’m a blogger with writer’s block today. I couldn’t even come up with a good Wordplay Wednesday.)

• domo arigato, mr. gelato what does this mean
• kentucky derby boob slip
• that girl in the sun chips commercial
• denzel washington speaking yiddish
• velvet paint by number jesus (Wait, you’ve seen my living room?)
• subway jared conspiracy (He ate JFK!)
• an evening in belgium
  
• sobriquet amish cannon (???)
• +gay +”guy with big ears” (Hope I’m the top hit here!)
• trivia that you can’t google (But then why are you…you can’t…my head just exploded.)
• al gore sataniste
• sexy hot lady or girls with animal zoo (This guy likes ladies and girls! Also zebras.)
• dog eats spackle
• alex trebek im sorry (Alex forgives you, my child. Go thy way and sin no more.)
• nude piefight
• baptism of pocahontas 6 toes
• ask trivia porn
• customers want crown molding upside down (Bastards!)
• the mormon guy running for president
• does alex trabeck know the answers to jeopardy
• peeping tom, how to (The comma is what elevates this one to genius.)
• fan club de anne murray chanteuse
• laverne and shirley muscle relaxer
• how to score with a mormon chick (Lots of Anne Murray; no nude piefights.)
• tv show fat twins slept in plastic containers (Ah, Masterpiece Theatre, I believe.)

Bonus question: which of these would make the best name for a rock band? Defend your answer. I’m going “dog eats spackle” but your mileage may vary.

On the plus side, there were lots of hits for “whatever happened to ken jennings” and equivalents. Glad I could help!

It looks increasingly like the Oklahoma City Sonics will be leaving Seattle after forty-one years. The sleazy new owners may end up leaving the team name and history here if it makes for a quicker getaway, so the city may be able to resurrect the Sonics using an expansion team or the Milwaukee Bucks or something. But for a few seasons at least, Seattle will be NBA-less while a metropolitan area a third its size gets its franchise.

Which got me thinking: what large American cities have disproportionately small pro sports “footprints”? And what small cities have big ones? Here’s the list, based on 2006 Census Bureau population estimates and grouping teams with their market’s largest city.

Largest city missing a pro sports franchise: L.A., of course, which hasn’t had an NFL team since 1994.

Largest city with just one pro sports franchise: San Antonio, the nation’s seventh largest city, is the biggest with just one team, the Spurs. In terms of metropolitan areas, it’s Portland, Oregon, the 23rd most populous area in the country.

Largest city with no sports franchises at all: Austin, Texas (#16), if you for some reason think hockey is a major sport. Otherwise, it’s San Jose (#10). If you go by metropolitan areas, it’s Southern California’s “Inland Empire” (Riverside, San Bernadino, etc.) which the Census Bureau groups separately from L.A.

Smallest city with a sports franchise: Green Bay, Wisconsin (#257 among cities, #153 among metro areas) by a long shot. I think the closest runner-up among cities is Salt Lake City, #124, and among metro areas it’s actually New Orleans, #51.

Smallest city with multiple sports franchises: New Orleans, as above, is the smallest such city and metro area, now that it has the Hornets back full-time from their Oklahoma City time-share. (It just occurred to me that, therefore, you can blame Katrina for the Sonics’ exodus from Seattle.)

Smallest city with franchises in all four sports: Atlanta (#34 by cities) has all four. (If you’re a non-NHL type, or think of St. Paul as a suburb, Minneapolis at #47 has the other three.) By metro area it’s Denver (#21), or Cleveland (#25) for hockey skeptics.

When the Sonics head east, Seattle-Tacoma will be the biggest market in the country with teams in just two sports.

With Iron Man’s $100 million box office weekend, the triumph of the nerds is complete. It’s now possible for a movie with a superhero you’ve never even heard of–one for which no Underoos ever sold–to make ten times more money in its first weekend than a movie like Once made in its entire domestic run. All you need is the word “-man” in the title and you’re good. Look out for Elongated Man Begins…in theaters Summer 2011.

Speaking of obscure comic book characters, here’s a street sign near my sister’s house in southern Oregon.

I wonder if this guy lives there?

And while I’m thinking about superhero movies, reader Eric Williams wrote in to say that he had recently Netflixed a favorite movie, only to find that his main reaction, rewatching it now was…well, in his words: “Holy smokes, Spidey and Iron Man are doin’ it!” What movie features this unintentional super-hero…er, team-up? And, while we’re at it, in what movie could you find these accidental comic “crossovers”? (These range from sorta-obvious to insanely hard.)

1. Wolverine and Batman–mortal enemies!
2. Mister Fantastic saving the life of The Phantom’s fiancee!
3. J. Jonah Jameson as Kitty Pryde’s secret father!
4. The Penguin mentoring Judge Dredd!
5. Ghost Rider and Punisher–in jail together!
6. Catwoman gets Dick Tracy’s groove on!
7. Nick Fury in a hostage standoff with Lex Luthor!
8. Daredevil enlists–and serves under The Shadow!
9. Sabertooth sleeping with The Hulk’s wife!
10. The Joker menaces Olive Oyl with an axe!

No post yesterday and not much of one today because we’re visiting my sister in Oregon this weekend. We were worried about how Caitlin would do with a long, long car trip, but as long as she was fed a steady stream of goldfish crackers and Teddy Grahams, she was fine. Dad of the year!

Back Tuesday.

I was supposed to tape a little thing for A&E today. Why? Because they’re doing some kind of show on people who are big fans of the singer Jewel. Oops, excuse me, I just followed my own Wikipedia link. I mean, “big fans of singer, songwriter, actress, poet, and philanthropist Jewel.” Philanthropist?!

If you’re surprised to hear that I’m such a big Jewel fan…well, yeah, so was I. It turns out that Jewel and I have exactly the same birthday, day/month/year. So of course, figured A&E, I’d want to chat with her!

Gore Vidal once said you should never turn down an offer to have sex or appear on television, so I thought WWGVD?, as I always do, and immediately said yes. Even though I didn’t really have anything to say to Jewel.

I finally thought of a question, but A&E called Monday to say that, due to budget issues, they wouldn’t be coming to my house to tape my video audience with Jewel after all. Rats. Because I was going to ask:

Hi Jewel! In many uncanny ways we’ve lived parallel lives. Both born on May 23, 1974, to Mormon parents, and so forth. I’ve always thought of you as my yodeling, non-Jeopardy!-playing twin sister. My question is, what time of day were you born? Sometimes people ask me which of us is older, and I’d like to know. Love Ken. XOXOXO

Now we’ll never know. Sniff.

Wordplay Wednesday! Almost forgot.

1. Take something that any college course has one of. Remove the last two letters; replace them with “LE.” Now you have something that any college course has exactly five of. What are the words?
2. Sometimes movie titles contain other movie titles, using ordered (but not necessarily consecutive) letters. For example, Wings of Desire contains Wind forward, and Reds backward (Wings of Desire). What Best Picture Oscar winner contains one fellow Best Picture winner spelled forward, and another spelled backward?

I was interviewed last week for this piece in the Orange County Register about Brad Williams, the second person ever diagnosed with the newly-coined condition hyperthymesia, which basically just means that he has a phenomenal autobiographical memory. Read the Register piece; it’s a good high-level overview.

“What happened 23 years ago today (April 7, 2008)?”

“Ok, in 1985 it was Easter Sunday, and my mom and dad were visiting me in Nebraska where I was working. We went to the movies the night before and saw Cher in Mask in downtown Lincoln.”

I’m mentioned in the article because Brad and I played NTN/Buzztime once in a local bar. It just happened to be the night of the week when they do the “What year did these things happen?” quiz. Brad wiped the floor with me. I think I was set up.

The first woman ever diagnosed with this syndrome (called “A.J.” in the literature, but recently outed as a Los Angeles woman named Jill Price) seems haunted, even tortured, by her condition. We’ll know more when her memoir comes out in a week or two. By contrast, Brad is well-adjusted, mild-mannered. Would having that kind of memory make you more reflective or nostalgic about your life? Would you be more or less alert to the world around you? Would you be more inclined to learn from past mistakes and avoid repeating them? As near as I can tell, Brad is completely unmarked by his remarkable gift. Except that he works in radio news, where it probably comes in handy to know the exact date The Poseidon Adventure opened or Alan Shepard died.

I think I have a pretty good memory, but it’s clear to me after meeting Brad that I’m not just some weak-sauce version of his same trick. His brain is doing something entirely different from the rest of us, something pegged to chronology. Maybe it’s been self-reinforcing since he realized (as a kid?) how his mind works, but his memory was always special.

What random autobiographical details can you dredge out of your past with weird specificity? For some reason, I still know that my sixth-grade lock combination was 9-28-39. Why can I remember this number and not the dozen subsequent lock combinations I’ve learned? Probably because it was the first, and maybe I was terrified about forgetting it. Strong emotion tends to be the one thing that fixes memory so indelibly for me. Not so with Brad, of course. I doubt he was all that moved by Cher’s Mask on Easter 1985.

Thursday’s post about the Harry Potter copyright case brought in a ton of interesting email–everything from angry fansite denizens pointing me to scurrilous on-line allegations about the breakup of Lexicon author Steven Vander Ark’s marriage (yikes! you stay classy, the-leaky-cauldron.org!) to notes from RDR’s publisher and even Vander Ark himself. Thanks to that last email, I was able to correct one error in the original post. I had misread a New York Times story, stating that RDR Books paid out a small advance and planned a 10,000-book print run, to say that Vander Ark had received a $10,000 advance. He actually received no advance at all, he says, and the original entry has been updated accordingly.

Not a single angry note arrived via owl, disappointingly.

Just for the record, I’m not defending the Lexicon out of any kind of personal vendetta. I read all seven Harry Potter books, and enjoyed at least six and a half of them (sorry, meandering middle of Order of the Phoenix!). Harry’s creator, J. K. Rowling, has always struck me as a remarkably down-to-earth and accessible personality, given her Unprecedented Literary Billionaire status. It’s too bad that a generally fan-friendly author like her has to be the face of a suit like this. But it’s an interesting legal issue–even an important one, at least for a reference fan like me–and it’d be nice to see at least one precedent go the right way for a change, as the culture of corporate copyright creeps ever more restrictively into public life.

And don’t forget that I’ll be taking on all comers at PlayCafe tonight, live on webcam from 6 to 8 Pacific. You’d better stop by–I had to clean all the junk off my desk for this! Stupid webcam.

The on-line game show site PlayCafe announced last night that I’ll be joining their site for a special game Monday evening. I’ve played games at PlayCafe on a couple of occasions, and I have to say it’s the closest I’ve ever seen anyone come to replicating the real TV Game Show Experience ™ for me…without my having to go on an actual TV game show, that is.

Most of this is the result of the inventive format/technology PlayCafe uses. Appealing on-camera hosts present the game material live, and interact with the individual players via a web chat system while the questions are underway. The gameplay is trivia-heavy, but has other game show elements as well: a Family Feud-like predict-the-poll round, some wordplay stuff reminiscent of Chain Reaction or Wheel of Fortune, and so forth. There are even chances at real prizes.

It’s free and easy to play. So if you want a chance to take me down on a game show, PlayCafe is the place to be Monday evening, 6-8 p.m. Pacific (9-11 p.m. Eastern).

While I’m whoring stuff, I’ll note that I put up a post earlier this week noting that I had some signed copies of Brainiac for sale (cheap!) now from the website. But due to some WordPress hiccup, the post was marked “private” and wasn’t actually visible for most of the week. So if you want a signed Brainiac and the book tour(s) missed your fair city, look for details here.

You’ve probably seen the news stories: Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling and Warner Brothers are suing out-of-work Michigan librarian Steven Vander Ark, mastermind behind the on-line Harry Potter Lexicon. Rowling openly enthused about the painstaking reference work to her children’s fantasy world when it was just a website–in fact, she’s admitted to using it to research some of her sequels, and her effusive blurb still appears on the site. So why is she suing now?

Apparently it’s because Vander Ark got a crummy $10,000 advance no advance at all from some tiny publisher to produce a book version of the Internet lexicon. Now that the on-line purity of the exercise has been sullied by the stain of commercial enterprise, it’s keeping Rowling up nights. And forcing her into court.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen much substantive comment on-line about the case. Just dueling who-will-win? quotes in the major news outlets, and, on the big Potter fansites I’ve looked at, outpourings of sympathy for “poor Jo,” crying her eyes out over her betrayal by this terrible, terrible man. Also: mean-spirited outrage directed toward Vander Ark. What kind of fan is he, that he didn’t drop the project like a hot Portkey the second She told him to?

Books like The Harry Potter Lexicon are nothing new. When I was a kid, I had a bunch of unlicensed glossaries like these on my shelves: Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance, etc. (Both of these books may later have been approved by their respective marketing empires, I’m not sure, but they were strictly fan-pub back then.) Even today, you can walk up to the TV/Movies shelf in a Barnes & Noble and find cash-in essay collections and reference works analyzing Lost, Firefly, The West Wing, and other hits. All these books profit by putting the Big Media Brand Name front and center on their covers–without the pop-culture teat, they wouldn’t sell a single copy. Profiteers, right, “Jo”? Burn them all!

Rowling and Warner’s lawyers are claiming that the Harry Potter lexicon cannot possibly be “fair use,” since it’s so heavily derivative of her books. It’s not just infringement–it’s plagiarism. (Rowling also called the lexicon “lazy” and “sloppy” on the stand, which is pretty rich, given the fact that she’s on the record as having relied on it in the past. Take one look at that site and see if “lazy” and “sloppy” are the words that come to mind. Probably not, unless you’ve seriously misspelled “scarily comprehensive” and “borderline obsessive/compulsive.”)

I haven’t seen the book version of the lexicon–and maybe no one ever will–but, judging by the website alone, the plagiarism claims are silly. Direct quotes from the books are rare, and are used only in epigrammatic fashion. Rowling may be referring to the fact that the Lexicon does faithfully describe facts and events from her series, and at length, but that’s an inevitable feature of any reference book. The literary references all look legitimate to me, as if due care has been taken to rephrase them away from Rowling’s language. Vander Ark’s entry on one “Crockford, Doris,” for example, reads

A witch in the Leaky Cauldron on July 31, 1991, who was just so delighted to meet Harry Potter that she came back more than once to shake his hand. (PS5)

While the relevant passage in PS5 (that’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, chapter 5) says

Harry shook hands again and again–Doris Crockford kept coming back for more.

I think that just rearranging the rabbit-warren of references and allusions in Rowling’s complex series into an alphabetical “encyclopedia” format would qualify Vander Ark’s work as “transformative”–one of the legal tests for fair use–but notice that he’s done more than that. Even in the simple “Doris Crockford” entry above, he’s added chronology, by calculating the date her meeting with Harry took place. (This is a fact that’s found nowhere in the actual Harry Potter books, though it can apparently be deduced with some certainty.) Other entries add interesting speculation on etymology, tie together related story or character threads, or even add literary analysis. No matter what Rowling said on the stand, this is not just her work, appropriated “wholesale and verbatim.”

Which brings us to the core of the issue: should an author own these transformative penumbrae of her own work, or should the public? I’ve blogged at length about the interesting case of Castle Rock v. Golub, in which the judge ordered a publisher to destroy every copy of a Seinfeld trivia book written without the show’s approval.

Castle Rock (and the Twin Peaks-related case that gave its decision precedent) is almost certain to come into play in the eventual Harry Potter decision. I’m hoping some of its reasoning is actively reversed, or at least pruned back–it just doesn’t reflect reality in an age where communities of people like to more actively participate in their pop-cultural obsessions. But let’s say the decision stands. Could a judge buy into Castle Rock and still find Vander Ark’s book legit? I think so, and here are the three rationales I’d use.

1. The Seinfeld trivia book lost out because, the judge decided, it had ripped off the very essence of the show, by borrowing its funny allusions and improbable plot details. Seinfeld was, famously, a show about nothing (nothing, that is, but funny allusions and improbable plot details). Harry Potter, though, is an epic fantasy saga. It’s not just fun-to-say names of spells and silly jellybean flavors. Vander Ark did borrow that stuff, sure, but he mostly left the essence of the book (character development, warmth, suspense, mystery) alone.
2. The Seinfeld trivia book lost out because, the judge decided, it effectively salted the earth for any future, officially licensed Seinfeld trivia book. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. This is patently not true of Vander Ark’s book. Does anybody really think that owning a fan lexicon, even a very complete, well-intended one, would stop someone from eventually buying’s Rowling’s own Official Harry Potter Encyclopedia, which lets slip new plot details (who else is gay?!) and replaces fan speculation with “canon”?
3. The Seinfeld property was a trivia book; The Harry Potter Lexicon is a reference tool. Much though I may love them, I’ll freely admit that society doesn’t need sitcom trivia books. Academia doesn’t need them. But society does need reference tools. People study influential books, and, like it or not, the Harry Potter series is now, partially on its own merits but mostly for its amazing popularity, part of that canon. Scholarly dissertations are going to be written on these things for decades, for crying out loud. Would you be surprised to walk into a university library and see on its shelves a book providing a historical chronology of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County books, or a concordance to all the tangled character threads in a Thomas Pynchon novel? I wouldn’t. Frankly, I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist. There’s a reason why the law explicitly provides scholarly exemptions for many copyright restrictions.

In a free society, it’s good that people can talk and write freely about art. Good things come out of a society being able to talk and write freely about art–whether the artist likes it or not. Fan-published “derivative works” are a tiny legal niche, but they’re not an entirely unimportant one. Maybe you’re a Gilmore Girls fan who’d love to see an index annotating and explaining the show’s dense web of cultural references, or a U2 fan working on a complete concordance to their lyrics, or a Spider-Man fan with an issue-by-issue chronology of his Marvel Comics-owned “life” on your website. This stuff is going to keep disappearing if the legal precedents keep following the Twin Peaks and Castle Rock path.

Or maybe you’re a Harry Potter fan. Especially if you’re a Harry Potter fan. You shouldn’t be crying your eyes out for the corporate lawyers and the Edinburgh billionaire. Don’t drink the Butterbeer-flavored Kool-Aid! You should be rooting for the librarian.

Two quick shots of nerd juice:

1. Take a seven-letter word that names a part of the body where your temperature might be taken. Add the letter ‘N’, mix up the letters, and you’ll get an eight-letter word that names another part of the body where your temperature might be taken. What are the two words?
2. Take a two-word phrase meaning “something that might win a Clio award.” Shove the words together (that is, remove all spaces) and you’ll get the title of a popular film of 2007. What’s the phrase?

Edited to add: answers quickly provided here.