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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 85: "who died yesterday." Though far down on the rankings, this search term pretty much sums up what comes before it. About two-thirds of the list has to do with Michael Jackson, RIP, from song lyrics to the method of death to long-standing associates. Poor Farrah Fawcett was quickly buried in the rankings—but for No. 3, her playboy images, and several misspellings of her name. A confusing addition to this picture is No. 35, "Jeff Goldblum dead," which resulted from Twitter-fed rumors generated by prank Web sites that the Jurassic Park actor had passed away. He has not.
No. 2: "maria belen chapur photos." Seems like people want to know whether South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine lover was worth destroying his career for. Although The State newspaper, which publicized the pair's steamy e-mails, kept her full name a secret, Latin American news sources tracked down the 43-year-old professional mother of two and tossed her to the wolves. The actual images are so far few and far between, but go ahead and see for yourself.
No. 14: "nancy benoit hustler pics." This isn't your typical porn-star photo search—a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Hustler was wrong to print nude photos of Nancy Benoit, who two years ago was killed by her husband, professional wrestler Chris Benoit. The photos are from 20 years ago, and a suit filed by Nancy's family alleges that she asked the photographer destroy the images as soon as they were taken. A lower court originally ruled for the magazine in October 2008.
—Lydia DePillis
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The Big Money Editor James Ledbetter offers this remembrance of Charlie's Angels icon Farrah Fawcett, who died today of cancer at age 62:
It must be next to impossible for anyone under the age of 30 to understand that there was a time when Farrah Fawcett Majors was actually cool. Looking now at that iconic mid-’70s poster, anyone can see the surface attractions that propelled her to fame: perfectly feathered hair, impossibly confident smile, and—particularly if you were a seventh-grade boy like me, staring for too long at that red bathing suit image masking-taped to the wall—the unabashed alert nipples.
Yet there was a whole other layer to her mystique that eludes today’s eye (to say nothing of the fact that her subsequent crises buried the real person along with the persona). Tits-and-ass primetime programming reached a kind of apogee in the mid-'70s, and while our parents rolled their eyes and tried to switch the dial to PBS, my friends and I devoured it with a pre-adolescent mixture of innocence and titillation. No matter what anyone might try and claim today, Charlie’s Angels was an abysmal way to kill an hour. The inevitable scene in which one or more Angels would get wet could barely justify the ludicrous plots, ritual explosions, and truly crappy acting. Even then, I knew it was bad.
The show, though, wasn’t the point. (At least that, I suspect, today’s youth would understand.) Watching Charlie’s Angels, having the FFM poster on your wall, clipping magazine pictures of the Angels in their bikinis and hanging them on the inside of your locker—these were more like badges, a way of participating in pop culture with as much sexual knowing as you could muster. Actually, as best I can recall, it wasn’t just a boy thing. I would not go so far as to say that the Angels were pillars of feminism, but girls watched the show. Charlie’s Angels was our version of a croquet match in an Edith Wharton novel—a way for almost-men and almost-women to play together politely, pretending to talk about one thing when actually you were checking one another out.
You were supposed to have a favorite Angel—some debased version, perhaps, of once having to have a favorite Beatle. (Kate Jackson was the smart one, but I can’t remember what the distinguishing factor between FFM and Jaclyn Smith was supposed to be, nor did it matter.) In truth, there was no competition—it was Farrah, always Farrah. Why? Blonde prejudice, for some, perhaps. But for me and, I suspect, most of my peers, it was for the most innocent reason of all: She was married to Lee Majors, the "Six Million-Dollar Man," the bionic hero whose cred had been established way before hers, or at least two ABC seasons before. And so I think FFM functioned as a kind of transitional crush, from the young boy’s fascination with physical strength and cyborg powers to the preteen’s need to branch out into a social exploration of sexuality.
When she left the show after the first season, I don’t remember any of my friends watching it any more, and by the time she and Majors split in 1979, the girls I wanted to spend time with had more dimensions than that poster. I imagine for her, the poster was something she wanted desperately to transcend, but for millions of American boys, it was itself a kind of transcendence.
—James Ledbetter
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