conuly

It's a Korman book. Good book. The whole plot revolves around our protagonists trying to simultaneously do their impossible weekend homework (ten questions on random subjects with no clue how to find out the answers, the goal is to learn how to think creatively and find information) and work on their radio show. Naturally, their brains come up with "have a quiz show!" because, after all, nobody is going to call in an answer unless they KNOW the answer, right? So now they just have to keep their teacher from finding out.

And it hit me, midway through this book, that nowadays it makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, plots of books rarely make sense when you think about them, because if they made sense they'd be boring (who wants to read about their own life, seriously?), but more than that. Nowadays, if I gave a kid a list of ten random questions and asked them to find the answers, they wouldn't agonize about it, they'd just go to Google. End of problem.

(My mother, when watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", gets very annoyed whenever they phone-a-friend. She says it'd be so easy to have your friend go to google for you, but none of them do that. I wonder what happens if you phone your friend at the very moment your friend is in the bathroom. Do they answer from the bathroom? On national TV?)