from Ship Erect:

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A: Morrissey says during a Dublin concert that George W Bush should have died, rather than Ronald Reagan.
B: In the middle of a successful reunion tour, Duran Duran, in their original lineup, play a set for vh1.
C: Duran Duran play Live 8.
D: Buzz for Morrissey's 2006 album, Ringleader of the Tormentors, begins.
E: Michael Stipe and Bright Eyes headline Bring Em Home Now, an anti-war festival at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom.
F: Morrissey's Ringleader of the Tormentors is released.

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points to Steven from Ship Erect for introducing me to Google Trends, which generates line graphs to represent various search terms' popularity, from 2004 to present. you can enter any combination of terms you want. i was hooked immediately. granted, that Google Earth stuff is pretty fun, but this is the shit!

as you can see, Google also gives contextual markers [the letters], but since they're represented by headlines on the actual Google Trends page, they're often baffling. not to say that's bad of course! we all love The Baffling. on Google, the markers for the graph above say things like 'A: Morrissey sparks Net furore' or 'C: Duran Duran bring back Save a Prayer' [accurate, i guess, but Duran Duran had been playing Save a Prayer a whole bunch around that time; it was nothing new at Live 8]. also, several of Google's letter-marker-explaining linx were dead, so i found new ones for these graph posts. they're too tempting not to make.

just like RJR-Nabisco, one day Google will have an addiction for everybody. not that i was looking for one, per se; oh who am i fucking kidding and so on.

why does the vertical axis lack any markings? i do not know.