I was up in Maine with the family Labor Day weekend. Mini-golf was played. Lobsters were eaten (though not by me). Maine accents were attempted unsuccessfully.

On the ride back, I read an interesting article in Newsweek about a book called "Super Crunchers." The idea is that statistical analysis -- data mining -- is replacing gut decisions in every aspect of life. It's sort of the anti-"Blink." Baseball scouts are being phased out by sophisticated spread sheets. Doctors' intuitions are yielding to evidence-based medicine.


My favorite part, though, was that the author chose his book title by statistical analysis. He tested two titles using Google ads. The first was "The End of Intuition." The second was "Super Crunchers." More people clicked on "Super Crunchers," so that's what you see at the bookstore.

Not a bad idea. Maybe I should start doing it.

I never changed the title of my upcoming book The Year of Living Biblically. That's what it was called from Day One. I'm a fan of the simple, self-explanatory title, and this one just seemed to fit. No need to get too cute.

"The Know-It-All," on the other hand, went through a raft of titles. First, I called it
"From A-ak to Zyweic: One Manâ€--s Journey Through the Encyclopedia."
Rolls off the tongue, huh?
Then there was
"Thomas Jefferson Had Clean Feet (and other things I learned from reading the entire encyclopedia)."
Or
"John Adams Was a Lush (and other things I learned...)"
The "Know-It-All" was in a list of about 20 other titles I brainstormed one afternoon; my editor thought it was provocative.

If I were to test it on Google today, I'd run "The Know-It-All" against "The Walking Encyclopedia." I'd love to see how it fared. I also wish Melville had Google ads to test "Moby Dick." I can't imagine that was the most commercial of titles, regardless of whether the slang word was in vogue then. (Speaking of names, I have to say that the name Google is brilliant. It's just fun to say, like baby talk. But it also has a faint patina of intellectualism, since "googol," as you may know, is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes).

I did some Googling to see if I could find some good discarded book titles from history, but came up empty. (Anyone know any good ones?) I did stumble onto this clever article about the original titles of movies.

American Pie was originally called "Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under $10 Million."

And Pretty Woman was originally called "3000," which was what Julia Roberts' prostitute character supposedly charged for one night.

By the way, it's late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning. Which means I'm a day late with my self-imposed deadline of posting at least once a week. But I blame it on ancient technology. I finally replaced my four-year-old PowerBook today.

The thing was in critical condition. Every morning, it crashed 20 to 30 times as soon as I clicked it on. I had to keep rebooting it. I felt like I was trying to start a 1972 Plymouth Valiant in January. Also, it was a laptop, but I couldn't move it or it'd crash. The disc drive was broken. So was the space bar (I had to press it three times to get a space). Many of the original Bibles didn't have spaces between the words, so I guess I could have typed in a Bible. But usually, space bars are a good thing.

Anyone have a sadder computer than that? I'll send you a free copy of my upcoming book if you do (and if you're the first to tell me).