Harold and Kumar Trump Obama on Guantanamo Bay

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

A colleague flagged for me this morning yet another reason to be depressed about the state of our society, and specifically what interests our citizenry. He had been looking at (the very cool) Google Insights feature that lets you see search volume over time for specific search terms.

He had been comparing "Guantanamo Bay and Gitmo" (probably something to do with Alex Kingsbury's interesting piece on Obama's Guantanamo Bay dilemma) and he noticed the top search terms related to Guantanamo Bay. They were listed along with relative search volumes (Google adjusts the data to make it comparable, so you can see how much they get searched in comparison to each other):

1. Kumar (100)
2. Harold Kumar (95)
3. Harold (95)
4. Harold & Kumar (85)
5. Obama Guantanamo (15)

For those of you who don't know, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is a 2008 comedy about ... well it really doesn't matter. Suffice it to say that there's something horribly depressing about a country in which Harold & Kumar trump the president on Guantanamo Bay on Google.

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