Why does it have to be a sore thumb? Land a brick on your middle finger's nail, or slam your car door on your little finger's tip, and you'll find that they too feel pain, no less than the Thumb, who gets all the press...

As for a Green Lantern movie... I have only one word: giant green boxing glove. Okay, that's four words.

Bipartisanship!

It's interesting to look at "Iraq"; there's a big peak which looks like it's driven by the invasion itself, but the rest is flat, flat, flat.

"Sex" seems to dwarf everything, though "World Cup" gives it a run back when it was on.

You can compare trends with search terms separated by commas. I propose try to find well-correlated but (one hopes) bogus comparisons. It's harder than it looks, because the chart doesn't normalize. "Dracula, Frankenstein" correlates really well but presumably isn't bogus. (It is a little scary to see Bucharest, Romania as the biggest source of "Dracula" queries...)

I am innumerate. So, does "normalized" mean that the top language/place is not the one with the most searches in raw numbers, but the most searches per capita?????

Hoopla, then no hoopla.

superman, batman, spiderman

I knew I was right to move out of Pleasanton! Living next door to John Bigboote was the giveaway.

Ask and you shall receive

Dinosaurs, Sodomy, Knitting

cats, cheese

And Meg? Perth is letting down the cheese side.

zombies vs. unicorns

I think she (and Elizabeth Bear) will be pleased to see that zombies have a rather pitiful showing.

Do they have so many parties in Italy that they have to research what it means to only have two?

Yes. It's the main reason they've had at least 50 governments in the last 50 years. Can't hold a coalition together for more than a few months without something/somebody going off the rails.

I think that ocecats had a big showing in 2006, boosting ocelots.

It's also the name of a shoe.

Oops, as Romney goes up science fiction goes down. Shows the effect of "Battleground Earth" in the hands of politicians. We should have it declared a WMD.

Amazingly, the next center of interest is Toulouse, even before Paris la Ville Lumière...

Well, excuuuuuuuse me.

Oh, and this might be a touch inflated: Science Fiction v. Fantasy

Alas, in a head-to-head face-off, vampires still beat zombies handily, though it looks as though fascination with blood-suckers is trending downward while interest in the shambling sort of undead continues to rise gently apace.

...must... eat... griiiiinnnds...

(Well, coffee is readily available even in the smallest towns up there, and strong enough to wake the dead.)

Sisuile @ 40: a very strange thing happens, though, when you look at the trendline for fantasy novels.

Why not? You may have noticed that the guy recently arrested for placing a home-made bomb in a clinic parking-lot was charged with (among other things, but apparently not "Terrorism") "Using a weapon of mass destruction".

The pipe-bomb in question appears to have been less destructive than standard-issue military hand-grenades and mortar rounds, which the Army of the former dictator of Iraq certainly posessed, so it's now firmly established that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, have Weapons of Mass Destruction and our invasion of that country was perfectly justified. I'm feeling much better now.

And Meg? Perth is letting down the cheese side.

Must try harder.

I note meanwhile that searches for kangaroos and emus show an interesting differentiation. Oddly enough, nobody appears to be looking for the roos. All the interest is in the emus. So much for one half of our coat of arms.

Pagan sees a peak every Easter and Christmas, and smaller ones at equinoxes and solstices.

Looking at it one more time, Pagan actually sees a rise towards the winter solstice, then rises AGAIN over Christmas.

They explain it at a link. It means they divide the number of searches referencing the search term by the total of all searches in that language/from that place. So, if people in Bucharest are exceptionally interested in vampires, even though they don't do all that many searches compared to people from New York, they still get a high rank.

Paging Stephan Zielinski: You have a call from the Sequel Daemon holding on line two.

I don't think I've ever even seen a Halliburton truck in Portland. Of course, I haven't seen any black helicopters either, so it may just be bad vision.

BruceCohen @ 52: the main drag of our fair city is now festooned with a series of Halliburton HR billboards. Apparently they are always hiring; they pay quite well; most of the rig jobs require little or no experience or education; your large white truck, gigantic American (or Confederate--take your pick) flag and shotgun are issued at employee orientation.

This area boomed in the early '80s when Exxon (and a few other companies) started blowing up mountainsides going after oil shale. Predictably, it all flamed out spectacularly when it became apparent that oil shale was far too inefficient (not to mention environmentally destructive) to be a worthwhile source of energy. You can drive all over the county and not find a single house built between about 1982 and 1988... people vanished overnight, leaving their still-furnished brand-new tract houses behind them. Now with the current lip service being paid to "energy independence," our rocky and inaccessible oilfields are looking tempting once more. Even Exxon is sniffing around again.

Those who have lived here since before the first oil-go-round shake their heads and hold on to their wallets. Those who moved here thinking this looked like a town on the verge of a takeover by priced-out Denverites in search of good restaurants and an active arts scene are getting the heck out as fast as we can.

Welcome to the Monkey House, then. We've had an influx of Californians cashing in their real estate and inflating ours in the last few years, but Portland is still pretty much a rainbow city in a Red state. And what I think is the best music scene this side of Austin.

And I was thinking maybe, mudkips?

I live near Pleasanton, CA and I was wondering why the hell I keep seeing it on the results for those search terms. Then I googled "4chan pleasanton" and ended up at this page.

Oddest night on the interwebs ever... And that's saying a lot.