It it probably far more interesting to me than to anyone else just what it is that brings people here. This is just a small sample of the silly things people look for on the Web, and it’s pretty obvious that what they were looking for was not to be found here. As usual, words that I would prefer Google send to the original reference have been obfuscated here with spaces.
- pitchers of crap – linked to a stream-of-unconsciousness episode written in a bar.
- www. my -funny- stuff drunk man fall. com. – wow. Linked to my classic google-bait episode G e t D r u n k!
- i am here for the beer t-shirt – linked to one of my cooking episodes
- American road Thelma and Louise – links to a prototype of my essay The American Road Myth. A better version is coming out on Piker Press next Sunday. (I also have a bit in this week’s press but it’s not as strong as my previous entries.)
- Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed – Linked to an episode of the same name in which I found myself back in a bar and writing.
- hotel bar sex stories for free – ’cause you sure wouldn’t want to pay for them. Linked to the Stories category page.
- Pitchers of nice bucks – I prefer my bucks by the bushel.
- disney piker pl – linked to this main page. Were they really looking for pL?
- avoiding jetlag – linked to an episode that doesn’t really have much to do with anything.
- monk murder “six finger” – Linked to the Feeding the Eels category page.
- dress OR skirt OR clothes “caught me in her” – someone who knows how to get the most out of google, but wound up looking at an episode like this one anyway.
- cartoon hammina – linked to the homeless tour category page
- SQuirrel – remarkable only because the searcher had gone through 650 other matches before choosing the SSDC page. 650. Dang.
- band bella – not sure what that’s code for with the kids these days, but for me that means Bella Roma
- chris “Good Kitty ” -cat -feline – given the search string, I have no idea why they would care about my opinion of Nicole at The Cannery in Bozeman, Montana. Someone clicked the link, though.
- girls shooting e e l s out of a s s – I know I said I was looking forward to the time I wouldn’t get these hits anymore, but the whole ‘shooting’ part is just too much to resist. Linked to the Feeding the Eels category page.
- cowboy urns – The searcher found the C o w b o y G o d, but was probably looking for a way to spend $825 on a dead guy.
- pictures of elk poop – it’s been a while since anyone came looking for that, and, now I have discovered I have one after all.
- emmigrants stories – aol search was fooled by a metaphor on my stories category page
- woman flashing breasts from convertibles – came to the homeless tour category page even though I haven’t mentioned the day Amy and I went to the racetrack.
- gatorade and death – another unlikely link to S e x, D e a t h, and W o r d s, possibly my most enticingly-titled episode.
- do they make a new vince lombardi trophy every year – answered decisively in my S t a n l e y C u p episode
- beer faucet icons
- there’s no hockey in heaven – brought them to this very short episode
- road of life and love – came to an episode I like about the road.
- content-type/javascript – It’s nice to know that someone looking for info about programming can find themselves reading about the current squirrel threat level.
- “pacific beach” beer – second on Google’s list was my masterwork concerning regularization. (“Masterwork” in this case meaning “lots of words”.)
- tiki hut girls pics – reading over this old episode, all I can tell you is that there was much more that happened that day I didn’t tell.
- Stories about the star constellation Big Dipper and how it got its name – umm, it does look like a big thing you might use for dipping.
There has been a surge lately in people who can’t spell “picture” correctly, and thus are led to my episode P i t c h e r s. Beethoven is big, but searches concerning squirrel violence are on the decline. As always there are plenty of people looking for cooking advice, especially on the weekends.
This is always funny. I, too, occasionally look at my tally for visitors and boggle at why “blow jobs given by hairy women” would bring viewers to my site. Google has a way of giving surfing freedom to all the kooky lurkers in the world. Thank goodness I don’t have to actually meet any of them.
You think somehow you haven’t?
Googling Crazy
Nothing here I care much for
Internet will help
hey annon, if you use the term “hirsute” in your pages, you’ll attract a much higher brow of googler.
And sometimes that higher brow will just be a single brow across the prominent forehead.
OK, here’s my opportunity to lament the current state of education, especially as relates to spelling.
Actually, I don’t blame the educational system. I blame society’s assumption of the infallibility of computers. I’ve seen it time and time again — the computer tells my student that he’s misspelled a word, and instead of looking at all of the options, he automatically chooses the first word in the list the spelling-checker has guessed he might have meant, rather than looking carefully at all of the options. Thus, I get essays in which I see “defiantly” when the student clearly meant “definitely,” because of the spelling-checker’s algorithm that says “definatly” means the former, not the latter.
By the way, when I refer to the student as “he,” I’m not expressing a gender bias. I have never had a female student who took the spelling checker at its word, and I have never had a male student who didn’t.
In a similar way, I’d guess that those who use “pitcher” instead of “picture” are probably predominantly male.
But the bottom line is that lately (and yes, it’s been documented in educational surveys), kids just plain don’t learn to spell any more. And that’s really sad, since they think computers can spell for them, which is utterly impossible.
Carol Anne, I admire your use of spelling checker rather than spell checker. I had never thought about it before, but yours is more precise.
Normally I catch most of those things by reading my work out loud. Might be good advice for your kids.
There’s a Website I found a couple of years back … I was looking for a humorous poem that is availabe in a gazillion versions on the Internet about spelling checkers. By serendipity, I found an extremely humorous site by a Wiccan who discussed what happend when she used the spell checker on MS Word to check one of the standard Wiccan spells. It seems to have become an Internet classic — I can’t remember the URL off the top of my head, but if you Google “spell checker humor” it will show up at or near the top of the list. The main thing I remember is that it was hilarious, since MS Word has no idea how to interpret archaic words or sentence structures.
Since then, I have always made a clear distinction between spelling checkers and spell checkers. The checker in MS Word is lousy at both.
I remember reading an essay written by Orwell way back when about the way language evolves, and spelling mistakes were a large part of languages slowly changing (I, as one who spells badly was glad to hear that I was playing a major roll in the advance of our lingual evolution) over the years. Now, with both spell and spelling checkers being so popular, the evolution of our language is controlled, and limited, by computers. Computers are clearly a tool of the anti-Babalist to keep our languages from evolving back into one mother language. Thank God we still have Text Message Spelling to re-unite the world! Long live the Babalists!
As a footnote, I showed the Wiccan’s adventures in spell-checking to a student I had at the time who was both a Wiccan and a computer-geek, and she was laughing so hard, she was gasping for breath, and I feared she would fall out of her chair.
And yes, Jer, I do have my students read their work out loud, to a small group of their classmates. That exercise does indeed help immensely.
Oh, and if you want a challenging spelling exercise, try this one, which I found while looking for something to challenge my students with:
http://www.sentex.net/~mmcadams/spelling.html
Could this man be our next millenial regent? Would MR&HBI descend into an egg-frying theocracy? Read on fellow tin-foil-hatters.
THE image of Jesus has been found ‘ in a family’s frying pan.
Juan Pastrano, 49, was hanging up the pan, above, after washing it when he spotted the image.
Juan, of Prairie Lea, Texas, said: ‘I’m a religious man and it looks like the image of Christ to me.’
He has sealed the pan in a plastic bag while deciding whether to sell it.
Visit: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005051662,00.html for pictures.