What's in a name?

As I thought about creating my blog, my thoughts first went to style over substance. What would I call it? Could I come up with some sort of creative name that would bring to mind libraries and Japan without titling it something obvious like "LibrarianinJapan."

In playing with lists of words and combining them in fun ways (a la Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind), I thought about green tea and library media specialist. I liked the assonance in greenteamedia, but I thought I should doublecheck to make sure that I hadn't just made up the connection between Japanese sencha tea and green tea. So, for general questions like this (no references needed), I went straight to google. I now have predictive text, so when I start to search google, the site guesses what I'm going to type next. (You can think of it as a generalization from business' Pareto distribution, also known as the 80-20 rule. In this case, 80% of the searches go to 20% of the sites. Or in your own life, you probably visit the same subset of sites about 80% of the time, with a much larger number of sites that you only visit occasionally.) This feature amuses me because I'm frequently searching for student and teacher research requests, and google never knows what to expect from me. I love to see what it's going to guess. In this case, when I typed in "What kind of," up popped "what kind of dog should I buy?" Not quite what I was looking for, but I was intrigued that the top response about "kinds" of anything was about dogs. My amusement increased when I clicked on it and was taken to the heavily ad-driven site sometests.com. I filled out the short quiz, and was paired with a beagle. (While I love dogs, unfortunately, beagles are probably my least favorite breed. I could elaborate, but I'll get on to the point. Which is...) Do that many people actually take online tests about which breed of dog is best for them and then go out and buy that kind of dog?

Anyway, after this diversion, I actually completed my search, "what kind of tea do people drink in Japan?" Not the only way to phrase my search, but it worked. I learned that sencha is indeed a variety of green tea.


Hooray for A-Team's second place finish at their meet earlier this week! Time for some quick trivia. From whom and from which work did I pull the title for this post?