I left work early today because I’m not feeling well. What I would really like to be doing right now is sleeping. Unfortunately I don’t feel well enough to sleep, which is really incompetent of me. I also don’t feel well enough to write. But I do feel well enough to start working on that Amazon problem I was complaining about the other day.

While I was poking around doing some test searches, I learned a few things I thought you might find amusing.

1) If you go to the books part of Amazon, leave the query part blank, and click Go, you’ll get 9,808,825 results at this writing in bestselling order. (Harry Potter is #1. Shocking. The result number seems to change as well — I tried it a bit later and got 9,807,691.) If you sort the results by high-to-low price, you’ll learn that you can get the digital document “Latin America Quarterly Volume Server Tracker Q2 2003” for the low low price of $99,000. The highest item whose price is based somewhat in reality (not MY reality, a different reality — a reality where people blow their noses on $100 bills and accuse Bill Gates of being on welfare) is the Super Bowl XL Opus MVP Edition, which can be yours for only $40,000. Hurry — only 3 left! More on the way!

2) Amazon’s advanced search page allows you to search for items published before, after, or during a certain year. Setting the Amazon search page to find all books published after 2525 actually nets over 1,000 results. So we all have something to look forward to (assuming man is still alive, woman survived, etc.) Most of these pages look like they were created by sellers who were a little careless about what they put in the publication date field…

3) If you go to Amazon’s book section and search for The in the simple query field, you will get one result — for The Secret.

I ought to be able to make something out of this…