I want more info about my username and I haven’t been able to get google to cough it up. I took it from the airport formerly known as Idlewild, and I can find plenty of references to place names in the US but not a damn thing outside the states to help me figure out when it was brought here and by which set of colonists. I want to know where the place name originated and google hasn’t been any help at all.
This happened to me here, and everyone ignored it. Apparently it’s hilarious, but I’d never know.
Well… My OP is a play on the original: " The goggles. They do nothing!" It comes from an episode of the Simpson’s (Radioactive man says that IIRC)
As a Google Answers Researcher, I use Google all day long. Thousands of searches a day. Sometimes a question really bugs me, and I may devote an inordinate amount of time to searching for something that won’t earn me much money. Boy, oh, boy, is it satisfying to hit paydirt with exactly the right search string!
I can shrug off most of the failures. I try to keep in mind that I can’t find something that isn’t there. Every now and then I see that someone else has successfully found something that I just couldn’t locate, and I do a mental D’oh with a Homer Simpson-style forehead smack.
I tried to find information on a company that is stenciled across a row of abandoned mail slots in a former walkway that has not been used since as early as the late 20’s: The Zarwell Electric Company. Google didn’t return a single mention.
[nitpick] It’s actually “My eyes! The goggles do nothing!” [/nitpick]
I spent a tedious little time this evening looking for a page that (I think) someone linked to on this board, of really awful pitches/synopses for books that never got published. It’s starting to really GET to me, now.
That, and info on “Shaft Drive”—the unfortunately named theme song to the anime “Geneshaft.”
And I could write a book about how hard it’s been to find technical information on various types of aerial weapons. (A shortish, critically panned, and not very well selling book. But still…)
Eh? What’s the photo? Maybe I have it. (You never know.)
Recently, I wasn’t able to find anything but the most obscure allusion towards accusations of abuse from Mimi Rogers to Tom Cruise.
Actuallly, I know I used the same phrase. My point was that I still have no idea what “creme of the cake” is.
There used to be a very long article online about the noted Albany political boss Dan O’Connell, that printed out to about 14 pages in length. In spite of all my efforts searching, using every keywords I can imagine, I still haven’t found that article.
I thought the name was borrowed from Anne of Green Gables. “Idlewild” was the name of Anne’s playhouse in the woods.
How do you become a Google Answers Researcher? That sounds like a dream job to me! 
At one point, I was remembering stupid “dirty” jokes, rhymes, etc. that we used to tell when I was a kid at slumber parties, etc., such as “Johnny Deeper” and stuff like that. Crude stuff, I know. Anyway, one of the jokes that I remembered was utterly incomprehensible to me as an adult, so I decided to Google for the joke to see if I was remembering it wrong, or if it just didn’t make any sense to anyone over 12, or what. The joke involves several people being scared by a ghost in a haunted bathroom stall who repeats the phrase “I’m the ghost on the wall, you can see my balls, can ya dig it? Chh, chh–can ya dig it?” (The “Chh, chh” is to imitate a maracas sort of sound, I think.) The punch line is when the last guy (who I think was “the black guy”–I told ya these were crude jokes) goes into the stall and says “I’m the man with class, you can see my ass, can ya dig it? Chh, chh, can ya dig it?”
Well, I found absolutely nothing on Google at the time. However, I just tried it again, inspired by this thread, with the search string “ghost balls ‘can ya dig it’” and I found this, which is pretty darn close! Yep, makes no sense. Actually, my version made more sense.
There are plenty of sites saying the Scottish rock band Idlewild named it after the “quiet meeting place” in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables”. That’s at least Canadian, with a hint of a Scottish origin.
The airport seems to have been named after the golf course that formerly occupied the site, also hinting at Scotland. This site says “The golf course acquired its name from an old Indian name for the area – “Idalwilde” – or peaceful and savage”, but I’m dubious given all the Scottish hints.
There’s an Idlewild Golf Course today in Wisconsin.
There’s an Idlewild Park in Ligonier, PA.
I spent hours and hours trying to find the music from the menu screen on the Old School DVD.
Part of the issue is that searching for “Old + School + Music” pulls alot of unrealted stuff for obvious reasons. Never did isolate that music track. Grrrr.
I’m writing my master’s report on academic persistence in higher education. I’ve been trying and trying to find stats on drop out from higher education broken down by racial and ethnic groups. I get plenty of data about completion, but that’s not the whole story, dammit! The cite I’ve found from the National Center for Education Statistics seems to have forgotten that Asian Americans and Native Americans exist.
Well, miracle of miracles has happened. I finally found it! Just wanted to assure everyone that there really is hope.
I also found another playhouse grave here.
My life is now complete.
My boss wants to know what “anarcosindaclist” means… so I found many Google pages with anarcosindicalista. But no definition.
Excuse the double post…
But here is a Dollhouse Grave in Alabama. I knew I had seen it during a family funeral. I had to call my mom to get the name of the cemetery.
There’s also an Idlewild Park in Reno. Plenty of others strewn around the country, I’d expect.