Spoiler: This was an April Fool’s Joke. Justification: It’s half past May already.

The point: Google’s Copernicus Center.

Google is interviewing candidates for engineering positions at our lunar hosting and research center, opening late in the spring of 2007. This unique opportunity is available only to highly-qualified individuals who are willing to relocate for an extended period of time, are in top physical condition and are capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen.

I missed it on the run-up, too, mostly due to being in an internet-poor downtown Toronto hotel. My husband found it the other night whilst playing with Me.dium on his new Vista-endowed laptop. (I didn’t know about Medium, either. Really, can you surprised I was late for the lolcatz train?) So he found it, and we spent a few minutes reading through it, spewing punchlines at each other, and giggling.

“‘High-density high-delivery hosting!’ HiDeHiDeHo! Bwahaha!” [breaks out in a few bars of “Minnie the Moocher”]

“G-cheese? Oh my goodness….”

“…’a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.’ Hanson! Did Space Ghost ever find them a comb?”

(Yes, I Know, I Haz A Nerdness. GEEK COUPLE R GEEKY.)

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Google are firmly on their way toward global domination by the simply expedient of being useful. I for one welcome our new search engine overlords. I mean, it’s one thing when the monopolist knows full well that he’s the only game in town, and lets that knowledge be his permission to produce mediocre goods at exploded prices, and sprinkle on top of that a heaping helping of human rights violations. It’s quite another and more pleasant thing when the monopolist never stops pretending that he still has to prove himself worthwhile and worthy of his customers. Google act like they’ve still got competitors worth taking seriously. They keep innovating new features, improving their quality, and purportedly treating their employees quite well. To put it another way, no one ever woke up one morning and went, “Oh, wait, we’re Google,” and then went back to bed confident that their laurels were so well padded that they could henceforth rest on them.

So I’m already fond of Teh Googlor. No surprise there.

But the thing about the Lunar Google joke isn’t just that it’s hysterical. It’s that it demonstrates that Google, or at least a small team of its happy minions, have the ability to tell a joke such that it endows the rest of their official text with funny. Maybe I’m just over-analyzing this, but–here:

With the establishment of the Copernicus Center, Google’s mission has grown beyond “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” Our new goal is to “organize all the useful information in the universe and serve it to you on a lightly salted cracker.”

The complete deadpan of seven pages of this plausible nonsense has the effect of making the reader expect a quiet knee-slapper every other sentence. So when you next visit the Google Jobs page, you might find yourself chortling your way through that, because suddenly the simple phenomenon of Google’s basic corporate writing style has become amusing.

“‘Aspiring to outsized accomplishments!’ *snrk* …Oh, wait.”

Or maybe I’m just crazy.

Whatever.