I think that will probably depend on how well I follow instructions from here on out. The dance thing, I mean.

You see, messages come in all forms and from many sources. In fact, depending on your belief system, you may even be convinced that you receive messages from beyond the veil between the worlds. And, sometimes those messages come along with a set of instructions that need following.

I suppose at this point you are wondering what messages from the great beyond have to do with the picture of Evil Kat’s shapely gams over here on the right. Well, to be honest, both everything and nothing. You see I’m not actually going to go on about being contacted by the dead. I am, however, going to go on about messages. In particular a message I received just the other day, and it just so happens that it has quite a bit to do with E Kay’s shoes.

In particular, her Mary Janes.

(BTW, I’d have put the whole picture up there, however if you have seen the revamped cover of Perfect Trust, for which this was one of many shots taken to create the final collage, you know things were far less pretty above the waist… Not gory or anything… You’ll just have to read the book if you don’t understand what I’m getting at… But, yeah, E K was one of the models… How cool is that?)

And, back to our regularly scheduled blog…

So, E K has several pairs of Mary Jane styled pumps. Dress up, work, leather, patent leather,  canvas, heels, flats, wedges, brown, black, and so on…

You get the idea.

I couldn’t begin to tell you about the fashion statement surrounding these, primarily because I have absolutely no fashion sense at all. I will pair stripes and plaids in a heartbeat, so I am definitely NOT the go-to guy where this sort of stuff is concerned. However, as shoes go these seem to work for the Evil One, and I am perfectly willing to admit that I think she looks pretty damn good in them. This latter fact may have something to do with one of those childhood memories, that being the little blonde-haired girl next door when I was growing up. We were all of about 7 and I was crushing on her pretty hard. Being the style of the 60’s she always wore frilly dresses and patent leather Mary Janes. They say you never forget your first love. Well, I wouldn’t call this playmate from my childhood a “love,” so I guess that old saying applies to crushes too.

So, there you go. Nothing sick or twisted, just Id, ego, and superego colliding to stir fond puppy love memories in my heart whenever I see the evil redhead in her Mary Janes.

Okay, enough with psychoanalyzing the Murv…

Now, the thing about E Kay’s shoes is that while most of them reside in her evil shoe closet, there are a few pairs that occupy strategic locations around the house – i.e. wherever she happened to take them off. Of course, her evilness is still more conscientious about her shoe placement than the O-spring. If you go stumbling through the dark in the middle of the night around our house, while traversing the living room you will trip over every pair of shoes the child owns. E K, however, does place hers pretty much out of the way. One such “out of the way” location where her feet become un-shod – and the aforementioned shods remain – is the general vicinity of her desk in our shared office.

And yes, Virginia (No, not you Doc… No, not the state either… I mean the metaphorical and collective Virginia) this is from whence I received a message. I just didn’t know it at the time. See below…

If you look closely at the left shoe you will notice a piece of paper lounged out on the insole as if it belongs there…

You see, the other day I rolled back from my desk on a mission to put something in the cabinets on the other side of the room. Since our office is relatively small our desks are against opposite walls. When I stood up to make the 4 steps to the cabinets I had to step around the shoes. When I looked down I noticed this bit of paper occupying the insole.

I didn’t really think much of it at first. Her shoes were sitting next to the paper recycling bin and since she is a shredding maniac I figured that in a frenzy of potential paper-mâché production the previous evening a scrap had escaped her evil clutches in a daring attempt at freedom. Unfortunately for the scrap, however, it plummeted into her shoe where it was overcome by odoriferous fumes and expired before it could get away.

Do NOT tell her I said that…

I continued about my task, tucking some papers into a cabinet, then returned to my desk. once again stepping around the pair of Mary Janes. This time, however, I noticed that there appeared to be writing upon the bit of paper. Again, I didn’t really think much of it until several seconds had passed and I was seated back at my desk. Some manner of subliminal trigger clicked, clanked, or whatever it is they do and I stopped everything I was doing. The image of the paper with the writing on it flashed through my gourd and I screwed up my face in thought as I wondered, “Did that really say what I think it said?”

Now I was curious. So, what else could I do? I rolled back, turned around in my chair, then leaned over to look at the scrap in the shoe (all while holding my nose, of course…) And, much to my surprise, it did in fact say what I thought it said.

“Leave Treat”

I’d heard “trick or treat” before, but never “leave treat,” although it definitely sounded like a pretty clear instruction to me. For a minute I started wondering if she was trying to get in touch with her Dutch roots and thought it was Christmas or something. But I came to my senses and remembered she is primarily Welsh and Irish, not Dutch.

Then for another brief moment I considered stuffing a banana into the shoe just to see what would happen when her evilness came home. However, since I wasn’t sure if that would spark some sort of Freudian dilemma or not, and I didn’t have any Vodka or Scotch miniatures on hand, I elected to simply laugh and snap a picture or two, because it was obvious to me at that juncture that this would be blog material.

Unfortunately, I get the impression that maybe I should have put some individually wrapped Dove chocolates in there or something.

Why?

Well, what you can’t see here is the knobby tread this pair of shoes has on the sole. The reason that is important is that I am now sporting a mirror image of it all over my face. All I know is that E K was doing a lot of unintelligible screaming while she was dancing on my head, but I did manage to catch a little snippet about her shoes being empty when she arrived home and when was I going to learn to follow instructions?

More to come…

Murv

I’ve been Googled.

Of course, that probably isn’t news to anyone. In fact, some of you reading this very blog post may well have arrived here courtesy of a Google search… Or Yahoo… Or MSN Live… Or any one of countless other Internet “search engines.”

I bring up Google, in particular, because it seems to be one of the more popular search pages out there. And, why shouldn’t they be? After all, they have all the money… Well, them and Bill Gates, but that last bit just goes without saying.

But, in this case, I haven’t just been Googled. I’ve been Googleified. In case you are wondering exactly what Googleify is, it’s my own special word. It is a combination of Google, from the colloquial Google, trademark for a search engine, and mystify, from the French mistifier, from mystère mystery, from Latin mysterium, to bewilder.

Yeah… Google has gone and mystified me. Or, as I like to say, Googleified. (Soon, I’ll be adding a petition for you all to sign. Maybe we can get Webster to add it to the lexicon… But, that’s a different chicken…)

The thing here is, and I have mentioned this before, WordPress tracks incoming traffic to this blog. In doing so, it logs all manner of cool stuff. Things like, IP addresses, country of origin, search phrases, and referring pages. Well, it isn’t very surprising that quite a bit of the incoming traffic to Brainpan Leakage comes from Google. Sure, there is plenty of traffic from other search engines, and there is also a good share from folks who arrive via notification emails, Twitter, and the like. But, where Internet searches are concerned, the overwhelming majority of the visitors arrive here courtesy of the Big Multicolored G.

So, I am sure you are now wondering why in the hell there is a picture of a provocatively clad woman astride a broomstick embedded on the left. Well, believe it or not, it isn’t a result of my “I Can Haz Blog?” post back in February. What I mean is, I’m not just sticking it in here to generate traffic, besides which, she’s not naked and it is a pretty common picture, so I doubt it would draw any visitors in the first place. And, no, Virginia, it’s not just so I can have something pretty to look at. If that were the case, she would be a redhead and look just like E K… Yes, I’m a little single minded in that respect. And no, E K doesn’t have that outfit… Well, actually she has something really, really close, but it’s not exact. Actually, it’s much better… So there…

But, on with the blog… Believe it or not, there is actually a salient point behind the picture. Well… It’s obvious to me since I’m the one writing the blog, but that’s not the point. What is the point, however, is that the picture actually has something to do with Google, in a silly, roundabout sort of way.

You see, when the WordPress plugin that tracks incoming traffic tells me how people arrived at my site, it actually extracts a list of the search words used. As you already know, these search words are matched to content, description text, and meta-keywords, on an indexed site, which is how Google, and other search engines for that matter, provide you with a list of websites. But, enough techie talk…

As you would rightfully surmise, there is the laundry list of obvious search parameters that land folks here at Brainpan Leakage. Things like…

• Sellars
• Brainpan
• Rowan Gant
• Paranormal Mystery
• And so on…

There are quite a few others. Some of them obscure, some not so much. Usually they make at least a little bit of sense… Such as “Erma Bombeck.” After all, I wrote a blog entry about one of her columns, so it isn’t really all that surprising that a search of her name would lead you here at some point. However, as I was perusing the the list the other day I ran across one that gave me pause…

“witches with big tits”

… Obviously we had someone here who was a boob man… Or woman… I’m not about to discriminate. And, by the same token this individual apparently had a fetish for Witches, or more likely if I were to place a bet on it, the colloquial “Witch Costume” sex fantasy sort of thing… I mean, let’s face it, even I still get a bit of a tingle from the adolescent memories of Elizabeth Montgomery in her Witchy garb…

Now, I have to admit, upon seeing this search phrase I assumed there had to be some kind of mistake. After all, a search like that should probably have landed this person at www.dorothymorrison.com.

Oh, chill out… Dorothy and I are like siblings and we pick at each other like this all the time. You folks know that… Not to mention that she makes plenty of her own jokes about her chest. Rumor has it she slings lightning bolts from her tits, but I’ve yet to see this myself, and I’ve been on tour with her more times than I could count, even if I took off my shoes and socks. So, if you ask me, I think that whole lightning thing is just a PR gimmick…

But, back to this particular Googleification leading someone to Brainpan Leakage…

After ruminating a bit, I thought maybe the phrase in question might have something to do with the op-ed entry I wrote about Facebook and the breast-feeding pictures issue. But, after going back and having a look, I didn’t find a direct mention of “big tits” in there… Not even “small tits”… Boobs, yes. Tits, no… And, definitely no mention of witches…

So, back to the drawing board I went…

Well, it took me some time, but I finally sussed it out. Seems Google had indexed the page containing the sample chapter from Never Burn A Witch, and in that particular sample was the scene where the old bum was singing his ditty about the ample-chested weather girl. All three of the primary search words from the phrase, (we aren’t counting with), were there on that page. And, if you want to count “with” anyway, it was there too.

Simple enough. Mystery solved. For a moment, I was no longer Googleified…

However, that didn’t last long. You see, I thought maybe I would look into figuring out some of the other strange search tags that brought visitors to Brainpan Leakage. It wasn’t long before I was “Google Eyed” and had a headache… If any of you would like to help, I’m still looking for connection to the following…

• R?zus p?rti?a apraksts
• ????????? ??
• jak przej?? gr? rattle and clank
• pokrútené ?revá u detí
• syntymäpäivä kortti

Ya’know… On second thought, don’t worry about it.

I think I’ll just go look at that sexy witch picture… Better yet, I’ll just go look at E K. Maybe if I’m really convincing, I can get her to wear her pointy hat and babe on a broomstick outfit…

More to come…

Murv