How do you find me? 2
Are you reading Mark Dominus’s Universe of Discourse? and if not, why not?
Mark’s one of the cleverest and most entertaining guys I’ve ever met; if you get a chance to attend one of his courses, you really should do it. Your mind will be expanded. Which is by the by, but hey.
The reason I bring this up is that Mark started an occasional series of articles discussing some of the ‘interesting’ queries that show up in his server logs, and he gets some pretty spiffy queries – if I ever get a query as interesting as “if n + 1 are put inside n boxes, then at least one box will contain more than one ball. prove this principle by induction” I think I’ll print out the log report and frame it. And how can you not love a blog that somebody found by searching for “consciousness torus photon core”?
Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m about to pinch Mark’s idea and attempt a pale imitation of it here.
I’ve got to say, I find myself wondering what the searchers thought they were looking for with queries like:
- fluent coupling faces
- very short pixie styles
- management ho topics
There’s a smattering of porn related stuff, which I’m not about to quote here because, frankly, I could do without the resulting adsense hits, and a few that lead me to worry about the searcher:
- the best thing about being white
That probably led the searcher to The best thing for being sad, which must have been a sad disappointment to him or her. (I found myself thinking of the joke: “How do you dress for success?” “Wear a white penis.” Maybe I’m just weird like that1)
Then there’s the java ones:
- What’s java for
Fucking up the brains of programmers who’d be better off with a dynamic language like Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk or, ghod help us, lisp. I particularly liked that that got asked more than once.
- java programming language for laymen
That one’s almost too easy. I’ll let you fill in the blanks
The sheep joke attracted a few hits too. I particularly admire the chap who searched for
- how to shag a sheep
Um… according to legend you need to be wearing wellington boots
- can i shag a sheep
Yes, but it probably won’t respect you in the morning.
How about
- study women in open source slides
That probably led to the Women in Open Source post, which might well be my greatest hit. Danese Cooper obviously has good Googlejuice, and a link from a comment in a Slashdot thread didn’t exactly hurt.
Am I alone in wanting to read that query as a command?
I’m still at a loss as to why
- are there women paedophiles in britain?
points here. I’m even more befuddled to discover that there were two separate hits from that query.
Dominus does it better
He just does. Dominus gets meaty questions in his query logs. And, on occasion he answers them seriously. I get multiple hits from someone searching for my brother and the ‘lumps women get when they get when puberty hits’.
Still, it could be worse, at least I don’t have to live in Philadelphia2.
1 Did I say I was worried about adsense ads? Bah!
2 Which is an absolutely gorgeous city really. I’ve only been the once, in sweltering August heat, and I liked it then. I’m sure it’s even nicer when the weather’s a little more moderate.
Actually, Philadelphia is a wonderful city. Except for all the corrupt politicians, urban decay, migration to the suburbs and so on. But that’s pretty much true for any city anywhere.
Perhaps the most lovely part of Philly is the water. Yes, the water. Not the river that runs through it with a deep murky brown hue that hides the dead, but the sanitized stuff that flows out of the faucets.
Philly’s municipal water supply has just the right mix of minerals to make the most wonderful kinds of breads and beers. The reason why Philly cheese steaks only taste right in Philly is because of the soft Italian rolls. Ditto the soft pretzels. And countless other kinds of breads. Those gifts to the world that sadly cannot be exported in their natural form.
About the only thing I didn’t like about Philidelphia was the heat. I don’t get on with heat. Everything else was pretty bloody marvellous.