Tiptoe Through the Google

Quite a lot of the traffic to this site is thanks to Google and the other search engines. I imagine that most of those drawn here with the promise of a match on their phrase take one look, say “Well that wasn’t what I was looking for,” and leave again post-haste. Nevertheless, I like to browse through the search phrases that brought people here from time to time, just to get a feel for the odd things people want to find. Some of the things I list below are there for entertainment, while others are there because the link back to episodes I like. Think of this as an index to my site compiled by a dyslexic teenager with raging hormones.

  • where is the rubble from Japan? – Where indeed has all that rubble got to?
  • how to write a nursing reflection essay – visitor 40404 landed, improbably, on an episode about writing without fear that I happen to like.
  • threat level indicator – It seems most of the other threat level indicators out there are for silly things like pandemics and stuff. Fortunately the SSDC threat meter ranks right up there with the top matches on Google.
  • sexy nymphs stickers – attracted to the verbal pot-luck that is the observations category
  • sex pitchers – more economical than sex by the glass
  • band rush bobblehead dolls – that just seems wrong on so many levels.
  • how much for a single rose? – Oh, you are only beginning to pay the price when you fish out your wallet.
  • “rat trap” bucket bacon – another poetry candidate. Anyone want to make a bit of verse that uses this? Connected to a chapter one that starts and ends well. Natasha is cool.
  • “bad song” daniel powter – could the searcher actually have been looking for my version?
  • respectable breast – rated high in google, where, nestled among the more predictable results, was a brief discussion of the American Road Myth, an essay that has since been improved here.
  • “you’re “selling past the close” again – linked to a tour through my unfinished business, an even more muddled ramble than usual, but there are some interesting bits.
  • ned’s albuquerque – sitting in a bar after a long drive.
  • some people ruin their drinks with ice” – a lyric I quote in an episode about a particularly good day.
  • Tallest Structure before 1889 – This recent episode is already attracting attention. (The answer is in the comments.)
  • english story writing-it was raining heavily i dashed in a deserted building – the Stories category page seems to have hit on many of those words.
  • born guy but had sex change now woman with pics – surprisingly, the Stories category page came up on top in Yahoo, despite just a smattering of matching words. No, no pics, and no sex changes, either.
  • origin of the sestina – Google has decided that I have the explanation the world will most want to see. Google is dead wrong.
  • bud light taste nasty – oh, yes it does
  • we met a the sports bar on sat in mesquite – but was Bobbi there?
  • fotbol slang – I don’t know any, but I’m still the top match for an episode in which the Czechs qualified for the world cup (barely)
  • smoll bar – a new addition to the list of bar names people search for
  • speed bowling – the precursor to team bowling
  • pregnant and constant headrush – believe me, there’s nothing on this site that could possibly be of interest on that subject, but there is always the Homeless Tour category page.
  • sunshine company ocean beach – a bar mentioned in this episode
  • strasnice – Google’s first match was for “Find a Grave”. My episodes that mentioned the Haunted City came quite a bit farther down.
  • beyond yotta – the rest of the scientific community is beginning to show interest in my pioneering work
  • haircuts by drunk man – That might yield some interesting results. No haircuts in this episode, but there is drunk.
  • “I LIKE THIS BAR” – not a bad search string — you could combine it with a city name before you go anywhere and find a good place to hang. Like, for instance, here.
  • sabotaging brakes – someone should have put the brakes on this episode, I suspect
  • to inspect mimeographed miles – an odd phrase, that, but there’s been more than one search for it landing here lately. Perhaps it is a line in a poem or pop song or something. Miles strike me as being rather difficult to mimeograph, although that might explain Kansas. Cowboy God was the number two hit.
  • How Many People Owned Televisions in 1950 – I have no idea, and I suspect the searcher came away from the Homeless Tour category page none the wiser.
  • as i drove she began to rub my crotch – linked not to stories from my road trip (there is not crotch-rubing there, I promise you), but to my Stories category page.
  • “Bar and Books” Prague – another bar I mention
  • trouble with trendy fern bars – I don’t have trouble with them, per se
  • “slush pile” “magazine of fantasy & science fiction” – the searcher came to the writing category page, but was probably looking for the Slush God.
  • lil j’s sports bar, san angelo, tx – another in my legacy of bar stories that rate higher than the sites for the bars themselves (if the bar even has a site). Maybe there’s a business opportunity there…
  • sad music – buried way deep in Google’s results was a link to a brief episode where I wonder what might have been.
  • menorca call girls – this is not the place to find out about those, but don’t tell Google.
  • kundera essays – if not call girls, then perhaps the writings of a celebrated Czech author. Linked to the Stories category.
  • moonlight sonata story – Well, I have a story called Moonlight Sonata with which I’m fairly pleased, but not THE story of Moonlight Sonata. I have improved the sotry since, but this version is still pretty good.)
  • “en vogue girl” – Ah, the key line in the lyrics to Cutey Honey Flash!
  • first time auditions daisy – linked to an episode about my experiences
    casting Pirates.
  • “embarrassment to our country”bush – linked to the episode long ago where I declared my candidacy for president last election.
  • why do sneezes come in threes? – linked to a not-very-good chapter one.
  • nature of bowling – not so surprising that Team Bowling would show up, buried deep in a list of results. In fact, it was right before an article called “Aggression in Invertebrates”.
  • hiking stacking.rocks – the dot did not interfere from MSN recognizing a kindred spirit.
  • cadíz – I’m surprised my episode about Cadíz ranked so high (5th out of 37,000), but it was the Czech Google, so maybe the presence of a few czech words here and there worked in my favor. Or maybe not — maybe it was my use of the accented í without the accented a. Czech Google may be more accent-sensitive, as are the czechs.
  • 9 bastards of the World – top match on Yahoo linked to a brief episode about Skype bringing cheap bastards of the world together.
  • can pomegranates cause flatulence in some people – came from a search engine I’d never seen before. Linked to the main page where I still have an episode that mentions Persephone and farting.
  • road food weed california – included here as an excuse to link back to an old episode about my trip to Weed, a rambling episode from early in my ramblings.
  • Jerry Seeger – quite a few people recently have been looking for me by name. I must confess I always have to check where they’re from. I know, I know, but I just can’t help it. New York is suddenly an exciting place for someone interested in me to be from. They have agents there.

Of course, there are the perennial favorites – Egg friers and those looking for lyrics to theme songs for very silly anime. Several people have come looking for suggestions about what to write in yearbooks, while others are attracted to descriptions of particular bars. In the last two days, there has been a surge in people searching for Suicide Squirrels, which makes me think it’s time to review the threat level meter.

I get a few hits from image searches as well. The picture titled Rain in San Angelo gets a surprising number of hits. Go figure.

What does this all mean? Are the search engines providing a cross-section of modern thought? I hope not.

49 thoughts on “Tiptoe Through the Google

  1. Maybe you’re thinking of Stretch Armstrong?

    As far as bears getting water from streams, under the old rules, whoever (human) got there first has the most water rights. So in New Mexico, the Indians had first priority, then the Hispanic settlers with their acequias, and so forth. Everybody had rights to a certain number of acre-feet, and the water would be doled out according to precedence. When the water ran out, that was tough luck for the latecomers.

    Now, however, the federal courts have ruled that the Rio Grande Silvery Minnow, as an endangered species, has more rights even than the Indians. Bears, not being endangered, have less water rights than the newest real-estate developers.

    Now, I’m not against minnows’ rights. In fact, I’m all for them, since the minnows’ ability to survive is an important indicator of the river’s health overall. But when the argument gets focused on the minnows, everybody loses sight of the big picture.

    What then happens is that the battle degrades into a farmers-vs.-minnows argument that nobody can win. The pro-farmer faction points out that the minnows used to live through droughts just fine, even when the middle Rio Grande dried up completely. The pro-minnow faction points out that the reason the minnows no longer live in the sections that don’t dry out is that those sections of the river are now too polluted for minnows to live in. And there’s no easy way to clean up the pollution — it’s runoff from small farms that have no way to keep the rain from washing the manure into the river.

  2. Anyhow, those bears are now getting shafted, and not for anything they’ve done. If they get into alliance with the squirrels, we’re done for.

  3. The tricky part about the minnows is that there are damn few laws protecting ecosystems. Instead we get a minnow or a spotted owl as a straw man because they are easy to define, when what is in need of defense is far too complex to describe on a piece of paper.

    So you get poster-child species being pulled about in court. People point out, quite rightly, that minnows have survived drought for millennia. The environmentalists would love to say, “yes, but it’s not the minnow we’re really defending, it’s the river itself.” But the laws protecting the minnow are much stronger.

    I’m talking out my ass here, but I expect that just like everywhere else in the US, there are enormous amounts of nitrates from chemical fertilizers and the manure pollution (also nitrogen rich) is coming from industrial agriculture.

    As an aside, nitrogen may represent the industrial dilemma even better than it’s atmospheric buddy Carbon Dioxide. I may have the date wrong, but sometime in the mid-1800’s or even later, some German guy figured out how to take Nitrogen out of the atmosphere and put it in the ground. That one discovery is largely responsible for the ability of modern agriculture to stand between humanity and an enormous dieback.

    But while some of that nitrogen forms the backbone of the yummy proteins we all enjoy, the rest finds its way into places it doesn’t belong. It’s one of those slow-burn problems. As Buggy frequently pointed out to me, we may already have passed the point of no return and we just don’t know it yet.

    Buggy is much more pessimistic than I am. He’s my first choice for VP.

    Uh, right. Minnows. Poor little bastards.

  4. Yes, exactly. The problem here in New Mexico is that the source of the pollution isn’t industrial farming, it’s lots of little-bitty family farms that can’t do anything at all about runoff unless they spend more in a season to control runoff than they take in in a year.

    Here’s the dilemma for the liberal — do you stand up for the downtrodden farmer, or do you stand up for the environment?

  5. If we were only standing up for downtrodden farmers there would be no dilemma. Let more efficient and environmentally sound food sources replace them.

    However, like the minnow, the farmers are concrete examples of an intangible boon to our society. They represent a culture that is endangered. Alternate viewpoints in our country are being extinguished at an alarming rate.

    So you have minnow vs. farmer, only the minnow is really a river and the farmer is really a way of life.

    Still, if the river is lost, the farmers and their way of life are screwed anyway.

  6. Yeah, that makes sense.

    To the Squirrel sabatage. If different spieces (sp?) of Squirrel are teaming up, could that mean that diffirent animals are teaming up? This could be big, realy big.

  7. If it’s any help, I do remember you and Bob and John making jokes about Maynard. I just don’t remember much else …

  8. Much as I hate to contradict my beloved brother, I’m going to have to offer contradictory advice to Chris.

    Pat and I are approaching Anniversary #21. Yes, Jerry’s right that if you’re the only one making accommodations for the other person’s shortcomings or whims, you’re in trouble. And if you’re afraid of making waves because if you do the relationship ends, then there isn’t really any relationship in the first place.

    But I will say that even if the relationship gets dull, it’s not dead. I just plain can’t imagine any life that doesn’t involve Pat. We’ve had a lot of tension lately, with his broken wrist that threatens his dream vacation, among other things. We’ve had a lot of arguments about what is sensible to do while he’s recovering from a serious injury.

    We’ll probably continue to have arguments. But we’re going to work them out. That’s just what we do.

  9. Much as I hate to contradict my beloved sister, but when she said she was contradicting me she wasn’t. I was just telling Chris that he can’t be rational all the time, that sometimes he has to let his emotions hang out. If all disputes are dispatched calmly and rationally without attention to the feelings behind the disagreement, then the dispute was never resolved at all.

  10. Such was the dilemma Spock faced on almost every Star Trek episode. (Obviously, I’m relying on the geek [the category of people, not the dog] friendly aspect of the blog here.) While calm, logic and rationality may work for Vulcans they simply aren’t the whole enchilada where emotional humans are concerned.

    Spock had to learn that lesson weekly (I’m sure he always thanked the writers). Real people shouldn’t be on that same, flat learning curve.

  11. Somehow Amy reminds me of the girlfriend you once had in Socorro — the one who wasn’t directly destructive, but who carried a halo of destruction about her. I remember you telling of how, as soon as she got into your car, things would start falling off.

    I have vague recollections of a tale of being stuck in sand on a beach at Elephant Butte, when the dashboard fell into your laps.

  12. Kerry wasn’t actually my girlfriend, but she did have the unnatural ability to break tings. It was she that last turned the key in The Heap.

    No dashboard falling off, though. The heap’s dash was metal and integrated with the unit body. There was no taking that sucker off.

    I’m trying to remember all the things Kerry broke, but at this distance (112000000000000 miles or so, relativistically speaking) I’m not coming up with much. There was a door handle and a window crank, and countless other items around the campus.

  13. On a barely related note, Yesterday I got a call from Amy: “Jer! I’m so excited! The car in front of me looks worse than mine!”

    I need to go back and update the Amy’s car episode sometime. I have driven the car now, and there are so many more things broken than I mentioned back then. for instance, the other rear window almost fell off, and the front windows don’t go up and down (“You can try fiddling with those wires,” Amy said, pointing to a tangle of electronics hanging from the shattered remains of the driver door armrest.)

  14. Interesting thing about old cars — they seem to be regarded as cool in some circles. For example, the Globe Trekker series on PBS recently filmed an episode in the Czech Republic, and at one point the narrator got a lift in a Skoda — an old Skoda — a falling-apart Skoda — that reminded me greatly of The Heap. Gerald now wants to take a ride in a Skoda when we go there next year for Lee’s wedding.

  15. I noticed a Skoda logo blazoned across the finish line of the Tour de France. Lance Armstrong’s main team sponsor is the US Postal Service (although he seems also to have a big endorsement deal with Subaru). I wonder what sort of image that conjures up about the sport of bicycle racing.

    The America’s Cup yacht race, on the other hand, has such sponsors as Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Citizen precision timepieces (they don’t call them watches when they cost in five figures).

    In terms of get-poor-quick schemes, Pat has thought of some sort of sports sponsorship, such as a very-minor-league baseball team or a promising but very young golfer or tennis player. It looks like bicycle racers may be a good investment; yacht-racing teams probably are not.

    Funny thing, when we lived in Houston, one of our neighbors was a profesionnal bicycle racer who was perpetually looking for sponsors — this was before the Lance Armstrong made the sport visible.

  16. To make it a better get-poor-quick scheme, take the bicyclists and have them turn the propellers of mini-blimps and put on races. You could give the sponsors great visibility with all them blimps.

  17. I read this over last night and tweaked some bits here and there to make for better reading. There are still some awkward sentences, but it’s a minor improvement.

    Enjoy.

  18. In your latest poll I voted for the “little shove.” You got stuck behind these people in NC, and since this is NASCAR country, I think they oughta understand a little “bump drafting.”

  19. Is it purely coincidence that ever since the picture of John & Buggy you’ve adopted a women only policy for the People in Bars Albumn?

  20. Hmm… that’s a good question. I had intended to get a picture of Bill in a bar, but the time I had the camera I was alone.

    Yeah, that’s the ticket.

  21. I had noticed that female-only policy, too. I’ve also noticed a whole lot of not a lot of light. If you get to Elephant Butte, you could get a good shot of Isabel — the entire front wall of the bar is solid picture windows overlooking the lake, so during daylight, no worry about needing a flash.

  22. Damn. That singleclick place was acting all funny and what not. I really got stoked when i read that most of the people in bars were photos were women. Now if i can only see them.

    BTW. The planned moron move is after the election, so you have time to visit.

  23. Not voting, voted. You betcha. Singleclick was slow for me yesterday also while I was posting the pics. It may be that Joe’s server is starting to feel the crunch from so many users. Or it was just having a bad day. He’s pretty active maintaining it, however, so I would expect problems like that to be temporary.

  24. As for the dark pics, I just don’t like the results I get when using the flash in those conditions. It took quite a lot of tweaking to get Shae’s picture to look at all acceptable.

    Maybe It’s just my gloomy side showing through.

  25. Hey, and I spelled umlaut right, too!

    Actually, it was US customs that were all over me for the roast beast sandwich. “Any agricultural products?” “Yeah, I have this roast beef sandwich.” “Oh, that’s not coming in.” “Can I just eat it here?” “Yeah, park over there and you can eat it while we search your car.”

  26. Well seeing that it is March the Twoth and the first annual (I hope) “Ground Squirrel Day” I am dancing around my hat firing my pistolas into the air! Later on I am planning on going to a bar and kicking back with a nice ground squirrel margarita.

  27. Happy Ground Squirrel Day to all.

    Instead of pistolas, I opted for inviting the neighbors over for beer and squirrel-b-q.

  28. Next Holiday …

    The Big Day (aka Road Trip Day aka Founder’s Day aka Jer’s B-day aka [occasionally] baseball opening day).

    As usual, this could be the Cubbies’ year.

  29. Two comments from the English teacher: It should be “as I lie sweating” and either “a powerful number” or “a powerful numeral” — you can decide on the latter.

    Meanwhile, my blender went missing.

  30. Oh, the horror indeed. When one has a place named after a Jimmy Buffett song, the loss of a blender is an utter catastrophe!

  31. I try not to worry about details on a rough draft of something I’ll likely never even finish.

    Blender, now, that is a problem. I’m still working on a toaster. It’s amazong how busy I’ve been lately. A regular workaholoc layabout. In fact, that sounds like my next blog entry title.

  32. Two years later, this peoplew just figgured it out:

    Have A Kick Ass Summer

    If I don’t always deconstruct Jerry’s writing successfully, at least (given enough trips around the son) I can decode a fourteen year old’s.

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