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!

Merlin Mann made one observation during his OmniFocus talk that I thought was useful enough to repeat (partially as a way of solidifying it in my own mind!).

Even though he’s Mr. Inbox Zero himself, he leaves items in the OmniFocus inbox until he knows what he’s going to do with them.

Thinking that way encourages the use of OmniFocus quick entry to quickly capture ideas and thoughts — I was shying away from using the quick entry box because I felt compelled to process the ideas immediately, at least to the point of assigning them to a context and project. But this morning, I dumped five things into that inbox during an early-morning call and left them there until I had a break in the action mid-morning; then I processed them all and was able to send four of them off for action almost immediately. It’s a much more fluid workflow.

Thanks, Merlin!