BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that sometime early Thursday morning 4/2, I lamented the fact that according to the national weather service, a blizzard is supposed to hit Wayne, NE this weekend. Why would I worry about a blizzard in Wayne, NE? Well, because as I write this I am sitting on the floor outside my gate at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, on my way to Wayne… Now, I won’t be able to actually post this until I arrive at my destination (via Sioux City, IA BTW – Airport code SUX… yeah, no kidding.) I can’t post this yet because it seems that airports have done away with free wi-fi and are now charging 8 bucks for a couple of hours. I don’t need it that bad… What I need is a Crackberry….

Either way, I had intended to tweet along, letting y’all know what was going on as I embarked on this odyssey to be Guest of Honor at WillyCon XI, the Wayne State College SF/Fantasy convention. However, I have obviously been thwarted in that respect.

So…This first leg of my journey will be compressed here as a randomly entered journal of pseudo tweets… My personal hashtag for this will be #fuckme… I will also be adding psuedo tweets from others who had a direct influence on my trip, but didn’t even know they were tweeting:

@mrsellars – Fuck me. Lambert airport is charging for Wi-Fi. No tweets till I make it to Minneapolis.

@mrsellars – Why is the turbine on the left engine going whocka-whocka-whocka-thumpa-whap?

@mrsellars – How many hamsters does it take to make that turbine turn so fast?

@flight_attendant – We use guinea pigs on this plane.

@mrsellars – Okay, I’ll bite. How many guinea pigs?

@flight_attendant – Fasten your seatbelt sir.

@flight_attendant_#2 – Wah wah wah, nah wahm nah wah…nom.

@mrsellars – Damn… She sounds like the adults on a Charlie Brown cartoon.

@flight_attendant – Coffee?

@mrsellars – Yes, please.

@mrsellars – Roller coaster turbulence over Iowa. My theory? Rising gases from a cloud of cow farts.

@mrsellars – May I have some more coffee?

@flight_attendant – I think you’ve had quite enough sir.

@mrsellars – On ground in Minneapolis. Texted E K. Now sitting and waiting for gate to be free.

@mrsellars – Damn! The universe apparently knows I missed my morning walk. Arrived gate F12 – connection at gate A11. Walkies!

@mrsellars – Still 3 hours before I can board egg beater express bound for Sioux City. ½ cup of Fiber One at 6AM now wearing off. Need food.

@mrsellars – Nothing here. Food court ½ mile back the way I came. Walkies!

@mrsellars – Quizno’s line around block. Employees moving in slow motion. Stomach not happy.

@mrsellars – Caribou coffee across the way. Going there.

@mrsellars – Consumed not so stellar 2 dollar roast turkey wrap with 1 dollar 11 oz beverage that had blue green algae in it. Total cost $11.05.

@mrsellars – Floor show during lunch. Captain Important paced back and forth in front of me yelling into his bluetooth headset. Impressive.

@mrsellars – Walkies! Now back at gate. No seats available. Crap. I’ll sit over here on the floor.

@mrsellars – Okay. Now I’ll tweet for a bit.

@mrsellars – FUCK ME! Minneapolis charges for Wi-Fi too!

@mrsellars – Fuggit. I’ll write it on word and post it as a blog later.

@mrsellars – Damn! How far up do her legs go? Interesting view from down here on the floor.

@mrsellars – Shit (or :poopie: for the Bitten by Books chatroom crowd.) My foot fell asleep.

@mrsellars – Aha! People going to Ohio are boarding. Now’s my chance for a seat in the waiting area.

@mrsellars – Missing my desk chair. It’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than this one.

@Gate_Attendant – Sir… Sir! Are you on this flight to Ohio?

@mrsellars – no ma’am.

@Gate_Attendant – Are you sure?

@mrsellars – Well, no, I don’t guess I am. I just told your ticket agent to give me a boarding pass for a random flight. Maybe I should look.

@Gate_Attendant – Why are you wearing shorts? It’s 30 degrees outside.

@mrsellars – It’s complicated. You see, I have a condition.

@Blond_Gate_Agent – Yah…Yah…I doo, don’tcha know…Yah…

@Original_Gate_Agent – Yah, yah… I doo too, yah’know… Yew betcha…

@mrsellars – Yep. I’m definitely in Minnesota.

@mrsellars – Holy crap… I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much “A Prairie Home Companion” hair all in one place my entire life.

@mrsellars – I didn’t even know they could still do those hairstyles. I wonder how many curlers they used on that one…

@mrsellars – They just started up one of the egg beaters. I can still identify individual blades on the prop even though the engine is screaming like a banshee.

@mrsellars – Wait… I can see the pilot through the windscreen…

@mrsellars – Reading the pilot’s lips – I think I can, I think I can…

@mrsellars – Might need to go back for coffee. Another ½ mile. Getting workout today.

@mrsellars – I haz a headache. Battery on notebook running low. Might need to find an outlet.

@mrsellars – Went about ¼ mile. Came across machine that sells coffee for a dollar. Decided to give it a try.

@mrsellars – Punched in 1 F 3 for what was supposed to be a Butterfinger Latte.

@mrsellars – Got 6 F 6 instead – year old pencil shavings strained through one of E Kay’s stockings with lukewarm water and a hint of rancid honey.

@mrsellars – Don’t ask me how I know what E Kay’s stockings taste like. I won’t tell you.

@mrsellars – How far is it from F12 to A11?

@Another_Gate_Agent – A little over two miles.

@mrsellars – Srsly?

@Another_Gate_Agent – Yah.

@mrsellars – Yep. Got my exercise.

@cellphone – Boopee Doopee Doopee Dooooo Ahhhh Boopee…

@mrsellars – Hello?

@EK – Hi.

[Rest of conversation censored due to graphic depictions of @mrsellars imagination along with sappy woodja-woodja lovey stuff…]

@mrsellars – Still have headache. Took aspirin. Noticed that people in Minnesota have apparently never seen a man wearing shorts before.

@mrsellars – Another hour plus left before the egg beater express flits me off to Sioux City. Hear they have Fly SUX T-shirts for sale. MUST have one…

@mrsellars – Srsly. It’s a moral imperative.

@mrsellars – Gate change. Oh joy… Not.

@mrsellars – Apparently Minnesotans are also AFRAID to SPEAK to a man wearing shorts.

@mrsellars – Thought I just saw Maurice Minnifield from Northern Exposure…

@mrsellars – No, not the actor. The REAL Maurice Minnifield…

@mrsellars – Damn! Rest of the passengers caught on to the gate change, and followed me over here. So much for a peaceful flight.

@mrsellars – Imagining E K wearing [CENSORED]

@mrsellars – {Bored Sigh}

@mrsellars – Wondering if @PaulCooked ever got that badger off his head…

@mrsellars – Pretty sure I just saw Kenny Rogers working on the ground crew. Must be paying off “Gambler” debts. (Ha! I kill me!)

@mrsellars – Guy with HUGE ASS headphones staring at me. Kinda freaky.

@mrsellars – Egg beater express got upgraded. Now flying on Estes model rocket. Hope the nose cone doesn’t suddenly fall off. Don’t wanna land using a plastic parachute.

@passenger – I’m supposed to sit in that seat next to you.

@mrsellars – Okay, but the flight is only half full and the flight attendant said sit anywhere you want.

@passenger – My ticket says I’m supposed to sit in that seat next to you.

@mrsellars – Are you just dying to sit next to me or something?

@passenger – But… But… My ticket says I’m supposed to sit in that seat next to you.

@mrsellars – Okay, “Sheldon”, how about if I move and let you have that seat.

@passenger – But, but… Doesn’t your ticket say you are supposed to sit here?

@mrsellars – No, “Sheldon”… My ticket says general seating. It’ll be okay…

@Flight_Attendant – Coffee?

@mrsellars – Yes, please.

@Flight_Attendant – Cream and sugar?

@mrsellars – Is the coffee really THAT bad?

@Flight_Attendant – Fasten your seatbelt sir.

And, now I’m here, and life is getting back to normal. Well, as normal as it can be for an old guy on a college campus, anyway…

More to come…

Murv

In theory, I suspect I am supposed to be posting a blog about how Martians are attacking Grover’s Mill, or going on about Orson Welles coming back from the dead because he’s actually from Planet 10… Wait… That would have been John Lithgow, and he’s not dead yet… wait… I’d better go check on that… (insert Jeopardy music here)… Nope, not dead.

But, never mind that anyway. I’m not really all about the April Fools stuff, especially given the incessant foolery I engage in on a daily basis. No, this should actually be my “no fooling” day… April Serious day…

So, let’s get on with the show…

As to the titular objection regarding my personal relevance, I should probably point out that there weren’t really any lawyers or judges involved. No darkly paneled rooms. No halls of justice… Or, justice leagues… Or super friends either…

Nope, it was just me. Well, me and a search engine… (I know, I know, the grammar police are on their way to get “I” right now so they can rearrange my sentence structure, but “me” wanted to write it that way…)

But, let’s dispense with all this April Seriousness and simply start at the beginning…

There I was, minding my own business, as usual… Another Sunday morning had rolled around, and 5 AM had reared its ugly head. Well, actually, I don’t find 5 AM to be all that ugly myself… After all, I’m one of those early risers, so I think it’s kinda cool. It’s quiet, I have the office to myself, and there’s nothing to distract me, except for those pesky chickens. Either way,  at 5 AM, believe it or not, I can actually get some work done…

But anyway… I was parked in the office, as usual, sipping my first “coff o’ cuppee” of the morn, while paging my way through volumes of email. Once I had perused, with great relish mind you, all of the advertisements for Lithuanian brides, generic Viagra, breast enlargement, penis enlargement, singles, doubles, triples, financial advice, free cans of “colon flush”, and all manner of other “hard to pass up” offers, I moved on to approving blog comments and the like. You know the drill. Just another Sunday morning.

Once finished with the comments and the like, I kicked back and surfed around. Being a bit of a “tweaker”… Not a mother tweaker, mind you. Just a tweaker. And, in case you are wondering, what I mean is this: I tinker about with my websites on a fairly regular basis to tweak them…

So, anyway, being a tweaker, once I was done with the comment stuff, I headed over to the listing of plug ins for WordPress. It wasn’t that I really had anything in particular that I was looking for, however, one never knows when there might be some kind of cool little widget, gadget, or flibbertyjibbet that would be fun to stick in the side panel. Or, more importantly, something that will make my life easier as far as maintaining my blog and website… And, let’s look at the facts here… I’m all about anything that makes my life easier. Of course, that begs all manner of questions, but we won’t go there… Not in this particular blog entry, anyway…

So, back to this whole plug in thing… As I scrolled through the listings, I happened to notice a “dashboard widget” for WordPress that was designed to let you know what your “Google Page Rank” happened to be. If you are unfamiliar with the Google Page Rank, it is a numerical value applied to your website by the search engine, Google… Hence the reason it is called a “Google Page Rank” and not, say for instance, a “Yahoo Page Rank”… Make sense? Yeah, I know, it confuses me too, but hey, it’s one of those things.

Anywho, the “ranking” is based on some manner of algorithm that I am not about to get into, what with mathematics not being one of my strong subjects. And, to be honest, much like the product ranking algorithm on Amazon, even Charlie Eppes from Numbers probably couldn’t figure it out, no matter how may chalkboards you give him. Suffice it to say, Google looks at your page, analyzes the meta data, content, links, images, linkbacks, embedded rhesus monkeys, flying purple people eaters, pocket lint, and every other damn thing it can find sitting there. Once it has done this, it assigns a numerical value that rates the “relevance” of your page.

Just for grins, I decided to install this little plug in. Why not? It didn’t take up much space, didn’t use any real intense system overhead, and wasn’t going to require much in the way of user intervention in order to get it to operate. Besides, it would be fun to see where Google had me ranked, right?

So, I did the clicky-clicky thing with the clicky-clicky thing attached to my computer. Lights flashed on the DSL modem, stuff flickered on the router, and somewhere in all that techno-garble, my computer did the download thing. I clicked install, a few scripts ran, and then the dashboard widget appeared.  Yippee! I must have done something right for a change. I had a look at the results and noticed immediately that it said, “mrsellars.com/mrblog has page rank of  zero“…

I paused. Certainly that couldn’t be correct. Just to be sure, I refreshed the screen.

The widget still said, “mrsellars.com/mrblog has page rank of  zero“…

Now, I have to be clear on something… While I’m a tweaker, I am not some kind of page rank whore. I will readily admit to being a marketing whore. I will even fess up to being “E Kay’s Bitch” most of the time.  That’s why it actually says “Property of Evil Kat” on one of my T-shirts. But, page rank whoring just isn’t my thing… Still, one would think that a domain named mrsellars.com, which has meta-tags about M. R. Sellars, a meta description talking about M. R. Sellars, with content about M. R. Sellars,  a blog authored by M. R. Sellars, internal links to stuff about M. R. Sellars, and external links to things that have to do with M. R. Sellars… Is anyone else seeing the pattern here? Good. Anyway, one would think such a pile of data  would probably have some manner of relevancy where M. R. Sellars is concerned. Know what I mean?

However, with a page rank of zero, basically Google was saying that mrsellars.com is in no way relevant to the subject of M. R. Sellars.

Of course, this seemed a bit odd to me. I figured that the plug in must not have been working. But, rather than delete it immediately, I decided to go check. Jumping on the next swell of DSL to come by, I road the crest, shot the tube, shredded the wave and surfed myself right on over to Google and ran a check.

Much to my surprise, according to Google proper, my page rank is zero…

So… I guess it’s official. I mean, what with Google being the benchmark… The yardstick by which all other search engines are measured… Hell, it’s even a piece of our vocabulary and culture… A proper noun that has been morphed by society into an accepted verb, adverb, adjective, and overall linguistic addition, which is now so deeply ingrained into our culture  as to define a generation.

Yeah… Google… (Insert heavenly sounding music here…) The  multi-colored, content caching, logo changing, power that be on the world wide interwebs…

And, so, Google has decided that M. R. Sellars is irrelevant. I feel so… um… so… well… I guess there’s no other way to say it. I feel irrelevant.

You know, in my way of thinking, this whole irrelevancy issue doesn’t seem all that fair. I mean, I’ve always spoken so highly of thos Googlites…

Hmm… I suppose I should start using a different search engine. Maybe they will appreciate me…

More to come…

Murv