Sometimes when I look at the search strings that lead people here I think there must be a message buried in the words. It feels like some sort of barometer of the world mood. Then I see that someone went through seven pages of results for the search “get girls drunk” to wind up at this humble site and I realize that overall humanity is pretty stupid, and the Web just facilitates that. Here then is a measure of that stupidity. That I can offer myself up as a paragon of stupid, the brass ring on the idiot carousel, makes me proud.

As tradition dictates, phrases I want to ensure do not distract the search engines are obfuscated with spaces.

• beer genuis – if beer makes you smarter, then by damn I must be a genius, too. In this case, it linked here
• sheep all dressed up – unfortunately comcast.net searches are hard to work back with to see how that could possibly have come here. But you have to like the phrase.
• billionaires give me a car – linked to my general Get Poor Quick category page, where I ask for multi-billionaires to step forward to fund my space launch idea.
• first, decipher this cowboy’s symbols, Th – I think we’ve found the limit to how long a url Sitemeter can store. I never did learn what to do next, but it probably had to do with coming in out of the rain.
• free spells for bring people to come to your site – now there’s a way to drive up traffic I hadn’t thought of.
• handstand pee dogs – OK, come on people! What do you expect to find with that? If you want to learn about spike you just have to ask.
• sam’s p l a c e lake t a h o e norm – notable among the many hits I get on that bar because Norm is a regular there. This was not a search on the bar, but a search on a guy in the bar. Viva Norm!
• trumpet bell making – you know among all the people who come here hoping to find methods to get members of the opposite sex wasted as quickly as possible, every once in a while comes along a true artist who is looking for innovation in horn design.
• bring a slave – linked to the good ‘ol beer slave episode
• temper of a rattlesnake – I used that phrase in a Feeding the Eels episode.
• freeloading – while I’ve used the term many times, the episode with that title was from when I was borrowing Jojo’s WiFi from her back porch while she wasn’t home.
• lyrics to “C h r i s t m a s C a r o l of my own” – I had the only match! Links to the Bars of the World tour page, which includes, well, a C h r i s t m a s C a r o l of my own.
• existentialism blog jer 2004 Dec – they must have been looking for me. My only mention of existentialism, however, was to admit that I didn’t know much about it.
• h a r d b o d y girl – I saw a tremendous surge in traffic last week (well, tremendous for me, anyway; it would have been unnoticeable on a larger site) and it seems part of the reason is that as of this writing Google ranks me number one of all sites for that phrase. I was excited by the increase in traffic for a while, but even now it’s tapering off and I realize that none of it means a damn thing. Are there more regulars than before? Hard to tell, but the ratio of regular to accidental visitor is certainly shrinking.
• what movie contained the line, sometimes you just have to say, what the heck – came to the main page. I haven’t figured out the whole convergence there.
• the statement the smell of cigarette smoke is erotic – I sure as hell never said that.
• pictures of white churches on fire – OK, sure, I do mention white church steeples in Through the V a l l e y of F i r e&nbsp to the B o s o m of B o b b i , but it’s not the kind of title you would expect someone interested in churches, on fire or not, to click.
• how to get poor – now there’s someone who came to the right place.
• sax between mom daughter – it’s nice to know there’s still interest in musical families.
• i gave her beer and now she is dead – Linked to my beer s l a v e episode. I’m kind of surprised at that. Nobody dies.
• t i k i l o v e g o d – well, clearly they were looking for me, but in fact I haven’t been to Tiki in a long time.
• sexy m e g a n – notable mainly because in the past the hit has been m e g a n stinks
• marmaduke dog name – umm… Marmaduke? Linked to a fairly incoherent ramble (beer may have been involved) that included the line “If Marmaduke was to choke to death on Garfield’s corpse, the world would be a better place.”
• gary sinese – by the time I checked, I had slipped off (or over?) page 22 of aol’s search results. So I ask: who in all the seventeen hells would enter a popular actor’s name, go through twenty-two pages of search results and finally choose to come here?
• squirrel drinking beer – if that is not the most unlikely yet perfectly tuned three words to bring someone to this sordid site, I don’t know what is. Not three days ago I sent Brian a picture of a squirrel drinking beer. Don’t ask me to find it again.
• great driving roads in virginia – Because it shamelessly sucks off the name of a popular song, the episode Take Me Home, Country Roads gets more than its fair share of attention. In its defense, it does describe one of the top two highways in that fair state.

Time rolls past. MR&HBI is no longer the top hit for “h a r d b o d y g ir l s”. You must search on h a r d b o d y b r e a s t s to find MR&HBI in the top slot. Damn, I’m proud (*sniff*). Meanwhile, many of the top hits for “h a r d b o d y g i r l s” are sites telling teens the virtues of being a herdbody. (That was a typo, but you know, I’m sticking with it.) I imagine articles with titles like “Anorexia: Make it Work for You”.

Egg cooking, of course, accounts for a couple hundred visits a week (although only 20 out of the last 100 visits), and there are always people looking for the lowdown on particular bars. The volume of traffic by people who can’t figure out for themselves how to get drunk and what to do once they get there is increasing (and alarming). It’s not a mystery, kids. Mini blimps and x-ray gogs remain popular.

What does this all mean? Why would someone search the web for the name of a dog they mention by name? Why do so many people turn to the blogosphere for cooking advice? Why do I spend so much time tracking it?

What else ya gonna do?

Sweet!

Thanks!