There are dangers in being verbose. WordPress lets me see what search-engine terms brought a hit to me, and occasionally I shiver at the thought of people inputting a particular string into Google and pressing Search.
One example: ‘nuns in garters’. Now, that’s not such an unpleasant idea, unless we’re talking about nonagenarian abbesses, but I’m quite sure my scribblings were not what the questioner was looking for. Now, did you know that Google gives around 40 800 hits for that string?
Forty thousand.
Think about that.
By the way, ‘nonagenarian abbesses in garters’ gives 67 hits. I hope they’re all just long and random wordlists. Why, if there was a piece of fiction with those words in it, I —
Rats. All just wordlists. I was hoping for something steamy.
Ah, my apologies. But, to return to the subject of weird search-strings bringing people to me, what about ‘wordpress cowpatties’? Don’t come to me looking for, er, excrement on my lovely host-organism!
(Uh, I had to check to be sure that the last word of that sentence was written correctly. I’m not actively seeking the ‘nuns in garters’ folk.)
(Then again — forty thousand hits should translate to a cartload of people interested in that subject. Surely some could gather their wits and pants for a while to interest themselves in a capering atheist comedian? Maybe I’ll end this post with a few thousand repetitions of the nuns string.)
(Or maybe I’ll just wait for the ‘nuns cowpatties garters unicorn’ folk.)
I get lots of hits from people seeking something about Hypatia, that Alexandrian lady mathematician and victim of religious hatred. They probably aren’t looking for my little tale, but at least it redirects them to Dzielska’s book on her.
Then there are the oddball queries — they often involve Eris, such as ‘hell eris’ or ‘eris about logic’. They’re oddball, because Eris the Goddess of Strife and Chaos definitely doesn’t have anything to do with logic, and as far as she’s concerned there’s no hell anywhere, never was.
Well, that’s my interpretation of her mind, and not such a big surprise since I am an atheist Erisian.
Atheist Erisian, you ask? Why, that’s perfectly (t)reasonable, to adore a goddess I know to be imaginary. Eris and her arch-rival the Glorious Invisible Pink Unicorn are admirable atheist gods — jokes masquerading as religions masked as a joke posed as a religion pretending to be a joke, and so on. Excellent counterantidotes to any theistic wah-wah that might come a-calling.
“But you can’t see God! He will not deign to be revealed by your foolish logics and experiments, you silly atheist person!”
“Oh, and you see not my Invisible Pink Unicorn! She’s always there, dainty silvery hooves and all, but she will not deign to be revealed by your foolish theologics! How dare you not believe in her?”
“You — you —”
“Hey, I’m a silly atheist person, you silly theist person. And if it works for you —”
Well, enough of that.
From time to time I get a hit that definitely suggests an exchange student new to the Far North — such as ‘kaamos period depression’.
Finally, WordPress tells me that one search that landed someone at my blog was ‘examples of bad maintenance’.
Ouch.
