When the new Shins record came out, my first thought was along the lines of “I bet Colin is going to like this record.” I thought that because 1- Colin liked their last record, but, more importantly, 2- because he likes The Smiths. This is the smithsiest Shins record there is, and probably the smithsiest record of the 21st century, in its still very shinsian sort of way. With that thought in mind, I did a couple of searches.

1- “Wincing the Night Away”, with 1,230 kGh
2- {“Wincing the Night Away” “the smiths”}, with 34.3 kGh

What does this mean, beyond basically nothing at all? It means a full 2.8% of everyone who had anything to say about the new record had to make reference to Moz, Marr, and co. That pretty much makes it a fact that… some web pages have “the smiths” on the same page as the name of the new shins record. For pure S&G, I did a google blog search as well, which gave results of only 1.2%.

Anyhow, my real inspiration for all of this is this post, which basically does equally silly google searches to determine that liberal blogs have more bad language than conservative blogs. A good statistician friend of mine recently told me a thing or two about statistics. I can’t remember his fancy technical terms, but it had something to do with lima beans, a fellow named Bayes, and the Oakland Police Department. Anyhow, the point is that doing google searches to prove points is sill (though admitedly entertaining: see first two paragraphs of this post), especially as it relates to bad language usage in blogs and being spineless and wishywashy politically.

Final note on the subject, this is a liberal, I guess, response to the original. I mention it mostly because the comments on that post are pretty funny, especially those written by the blogger himself. Actually, i dig the whole blog, I might have to add it to my sparsely populated and seldom used blogroll.