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Google has become part of my daily life, but every so often, I am still amazed by what it makes possible.

This morning, while washing some dishes, a tiny fragment of melody from my childhood popped into my head — it was a line from some novelty song that I think we’d sung in elementary school. I’d never known the name of the song, and all I could really remember of the lyrics was this:

[something] is a raccoon….always hungry, very hungry….he sings [something else]

I couldn’t get the little bit of music out of my head, so I wondered if I could find out what it was.

I typed “always hungry very hungry” raccoon into Google and got two results, both of which were from Japanese pages, and both of which had a bit more of the song in the translated search result fragment. I clicked on the first one and was greeted with a page of imperfectly translated Japanese; searching on “raccoon” brought me to an entry with this text:

this song is sung by Arthur kit

and with a picture of an Eartha Kitt album in the left margin of the entry:

So I went back to Google and typed Eartha Kitt raccoon; the second hit was this YouTube video-free video, with Eartha Kitt herself singing the song, Sho-Jo-Ji (the Hungry Raccoon).

Elapsed time from wondering to result: about 90 seconds.

There are times I wish I could Google the workings of my mind, but perhaps I’m better off not knowing myself that well!