There is (unless I’ve changed the design of the blog by the time you read this) a widget about halfway down the righthand column giving some of the more interesting search terms that people have used to find this blog. I don’t update it very often, partly because I don’t get many interesting searches and partly because I don’t want to bump most of the phrases that are listed there at the moment. I mean, take Dalton aspirin communism headaches – I’m quite proud to have been there for whoever was looking for that, even if the actual post was mainly about the future of the EU. (Note to self: planned Roque Dalton post prompted by recent LRB article now seriously overdue. I mean, recent LRB article no longer all that recent.)
As I write, the search terms for yesterday and today are listed as
“dont think we have enough protest
universita sweater
and was jerusalem builded here rules
underneath elegant women pics
heswall animal rescue
why are americans so uptight about eroti
manchester grammar school naked swimming
scott walker protest song
The last one is odd – “Hero of the war” would qualify, I guess – and I’m sure there’s a story behind the last but one. (Although not one that you can find anywhere on this blog – I’ve never even mentioned Manchester Grammar School before this post.) “and was jerusalem builded here rules” (emph. added) is also a bit of a mystery. As for this week’s Top Searches, here they are:
universita sweater
vivid cambridge topless
fashion shoot with social awareness
fass glas
“these scientists eh? they’re so stupid! you know those black box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? and you know they’re meant to be indestructible? it’s always the thing that doesn’t get smashed? so why don’t they make the planes out of the same stuff?” the audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, how they couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, but i sat feeling uncomfortable. was i just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn’t really work because flight recorders are made out titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium they’d be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place?
The first three… well, you can find it yourself if you’re curious; I slightly regret posting it, although probably not as much as some people regret clicking through to it. “Fass” and “Glas” both appear to be German words, but otherwise the fourth search term is a mystery to me.
But the fifth is something else. It’s an extensive quote from Douglas Adams, which goes in this instance to this post. Blimey, I was writing proper posts back then. It’s crafted like a sermon, that one – or a good opinion column, which I guess was the model I had in mind: you go from the David Bowie title to the Douglas Adams quote, which turns out to be there to support an observation about Terry Pratchett, which in turn leads into a discussion of… the War on Terror and the London bombings of July 2005. Proper deep thought, and fairly controversial with it. I’m bigging myself up here, but only myself in 2005 – reading that post in 2010 makes me feel quite inadequate.
Setting aside where it leads, a couple of things about that search term boggle me. I can’t imagine why somebody would type the whole thing into a search box, and find it hard to imagine that anybody would. Nevertheless, somebody (and perhaps more than one somebody) does seem to have done so – the lower-case letters in particular (was i just being pedantic) militate against cut and paste. I hope they found the post interesting when they got to it. I was also struck by the fact that my blog isn’t the only hit for that chunk of text – it’s actually the eighth out of eight (although the post on my original blog is third; I think I copied the text myself from the first hit, which is on Charles Arthur’s blog). It’s nice to see that there’s an audience for Adams-related blogging, as I’ve been planning to do a bit more – well, I’ve been planning to write something about And another thing, anyway. I wasn’t thinking of using it as a lead-in to anything else, though, except possibly another book I’ve read recently. (I feel like apologising to Phil of 2005 – I’d be a great disappointment to me. Not sure what’s changed; perhaps it’s because I had a less interesting job back then, or I pinned more hopes on blogging – or just because I was newer to it?)
For now, can I interest you in Douglas Reed? “Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth“? giant octopus? They’re not necessarily the best posts I’ve ever written, but I can guarantee that none of them is about the future of the EU.
Update 5th August. Search of the day: “fashion photography from the boobs”. Yes, it’s another one of those searches – I’m starting to wonder about taking those posts down – but ‘from’ is curious; wouldn’t that rather defeat the object?
I’ll get my raincoat.
Workers’ Playtime 