Well call me Ishmael! Everyone seems to want to know about the classic American novel published exactly 161 years ago today.
Take that, Lohan.... Herman Melville, pictured here in an undated photo, rocks the internet, 161 years after the publication of "Moby Dick."
What two-word phrase was among the most searched this week on Google?
Lindsay Lohan? Maybe.
Justin Bieber? Perhaps.
Free porn? Duh!
Try the title of a classic American novel published exactly 161 years ago today in London.
Yes, "Moby Dick" still knows how to cause a stir, more than a century and a half after Herman Melville released his book set on the high seas as Captain Ahab and his crew chase down the infamous white whale.
(And as many of our readers probably know, not only were many of the early scenes in the novel set in Massachusetts (New Bedford and Nantucket), Melville wrote the book while living in Pittsfield, where he purchased the farm house known as Arrowhead in 1850. And by the way, if you have have to chance to visit Arrowhead, take a look out the window above the spot where Melville reportedly wrote "Moby Dick." Mount Greylock looms in the distance and looks very much like the large hump on the back of a whale. Coincidence? I think not!)
So why is the title of book among the most searched phrases on Google this week, generating over a million searches on Wednesday alone? Perhaps Google helped out a little bit, by featuring a "Google doodle" (those drawings that sometime appear on the Google search page) of a crew of fisherman in pursuit of a white whale.
(Then again, maybe all those Zepheads in love with "Led Zeppelin II" just happened to flood the Internet the same day that literary scholars stumbled across Google's tribute to the Peqoud and thought to themselves, "Hey, look! Here's something I've actually heard of besides "Downton Abbey.")
I'm just wondering if this could start a whole new Google trend.
Suddenly, TMZ could be shifting its focus from gossip about Kim Kardashian and Flavor Flav (then again, who doesn't love reading about the Flav?).
Instead, we will be fed a steady diet of racy reports about Henry James' red-hot "Portrait of A Lady" or scandalous new poems by the bad boy of 20th Century poetry, E.B. White.
My money's on Emily Dickinson rocking the Google on Dec. 10.