BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

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

Well, maybe not “carnage” so much, but our Red Bud tree took some damage from the freak March snowstorm that struck overnight here in Saint Louis. Only a few inches of the white stuff fell, but it was in a very, very short period of time. Plus, it was the heavy, wet snow that tends to weigh things down.

It was around 4:45 – 5:00 AM when I heard the sickening sound of cracking lumber. In my half sleep I actually felt a bit of panic because there used to be a large oak right outside our back door, and it had been dying for years. I finally had it taken out summer before last, but in the past it had dropped limbs and exacted a toll on both our house and that of our neighbor.  However, up until I had it removed I had harbored a fear that it would some day send one of the larger branches through our roof, and if that happened, our bedroom would be right in the damage path.  Still in a semi-dream state, this was my muddied brain’s first thought. I hooked an arm around E K as I rolled to the right, but before I could push her off the bed and out of harm’s way, I heard the heavy thud of the branch hitting the ground outside instead of coming through the roof on top of us. My brain woke just a bit more and in that instant I remembered that the oak was gone.

Good thing too…

E K was still asleep, but if I had pushed her off onto the floor, I’m betting she wouldn’t have been for long.

I crawled out of the bed and looked out the back window of our bedroom. Snow covered the landscape in an uneven, spotty blanket. And there, in the middle of the yard, was a major branch of our Red Bud tree. At that point, I pretty much sighed and then muttered, “This ain’t good.”

Since it had been in the 70’s and 80’s for the past couple of weeks, trees were budding and sprouts were sprouting. If you are familiar with the Red Bud, you know that in the spring it is covered with tiny reddish-magenta flowering buds for a week or two. Unfortunately, those miniscule flowers formed enough of a lattice to capture and hold the snow, making the weight on the branch too much to bear.

This particular Red Bud was one I had given E K as a birthday gift around 15 years ago. Actually, I gave her a stake with an orange flag on it and told her to go stick it in the yard wherever she wanted a tree. And, no, before you ask, I didn’t make her water it or anything … Two days after she stabbed it into the ground like a Van Helsing disciple offing a vampire – (and she looked pretty damn hot doing it too, as I recall) – the nursery arrived while we were at work and planted the tree she had been telling me she wanted.

At any rate, as promised in my “tweets” early this morning, below are a couple of pictures of the tree…

This would be the view from our bedroom window on the second floor. It was taken by E K early this morning while it was still extremely overcast, so I had to adjust it a bit in Photoshop. (click photo to enlarge.)

From the back of the yard, later in the day. As you can see, the snow disappeared within a matter of a scant few hours, and the sun was brightly shining. What isn’t obvious is that the ground is saturated (it rained all day before the snow arrived) and there is even standing water in the depressions throughout the lawn. (click photo to enlarge)

There you have it. Our backyard carnage. Looks like I am going to be pulling out the chainsaw in the next day or two before I have to jet off to Nebraska.

More to come…

Murv