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  • Murv’s Not So Excellent Adventure…

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    Part 1 of 4…

    ohio
    Those of you who follow me on Twitter, etc, know that I went to Ohio recently. I had a book signing and presented workshops at a great store called Violet Flame Gifts. VFG is absolutely wonderful. Heather, the owner, and her entire family always treat me like royalty, they feed me until I am about to burst, and they are just plain fun to be around, as are the folks who come to the store for the seminars and such. I am always glad to return to VFG or the VFG sponsored event, Earth Warriors Festival, because I know I will have a great time while I am there.

    However… (aww c’mon, you knew it was coming)… In the 5 years I have been visiting the Newark, Ohio store, either my trip to or from has been fraught with some kind of issue, such as delays. I don’t blame Heather or VFG for this, so please don’t get that idea. These are things completely out of her control. I’m just starting to believe there is an anti-Murv vortex hanging over the Ohio valley, but only insofar as travel – specifically flying.

    Now, at the risk of waxing nostalgic, something I do all the time as you all well know, I’m old enough that I can clearly recall when air travel was nothing short of glamorous. It was the purview of those with money, and those who could afford to travel in the lap of luxury.
    Airborne Waitresses
    Back then, flight attendants were called Stewardesses, and they were the bomb. Not only were they pretty and wore great uniforms, they smiled and made you feel welcome, important, and appreciated.

    Hell, in 1975 one of them donned a headset, climbed behind the controls, and flew a crippled 747 through the mountains of Colorado after a light aircraft ripped a hole in the side of the Jumbo Jet and killed off the flight crew… Okay, okay, so Airport ’75 was just a movie. It didn’t actually happen. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that back in the day, “Stewardesses” were the “bomb” – little girls wanted to grow up to be them, and little boys wanted to grow up to date them. And who could blame them? These were the elite hostesses of the air. The cream of the crop.

    These days, that just isn’t how it is. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some stellar flight attendants out there, and I’ve even met a few – both female and male – but they seem to be few and far between… on my flights, at least. Usually I end up faced with an angry airborne waitress or waiter with a sour disposition and a superiority complex. I suppose it could be the uniform and the wings that make them feel so powerful. If that’s the case, and the outfit carries with it that kind of influence, perhaps I should start wearing a blazer with elbow patches and chewing on a fancy meerschaum pipe. Then maybe I’d feel more like an author instead of just some guy who accidentally sticks words to paper sometimes.

    flightplan
    But, as usual, I digress…

    To be honest, the flight attendants are only one symptom in a vast array of ailments where air travel is concerned, and thus far they’ve never been my problem on these Ohio odysseys. Well… Except for the guy we’ll call Mr. Chronic Halitosis. He was working coach on the first leg of my trip to Ohio, and I’m not sure what crawled into his mouth and died, but he really needed to pry it out of there and use some strong mouthwash. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the 2 dollar cologne he had bathed in that day really didn’t help either. It just made you gasp, which in turn allowed you to get the full effect of the halitosis. Hmm… Maybe that was his plan all along. Lucky for me it was a short flight.

    But, getting back to the other issues… Truth is, the major pain that has been affecting me quite a bit over the last couple of years is the fact that you can no longer “get there from here.” By that I mean you are pretty much unable to board an airplane in Saint Louis and disembark at your destination without first visiting 1 or more additional cities along the way. This holds true for almost any destination with only a few minor exceptions, but especially for Ohio.

    And furthermore, it’s not like they pull in, fill up the tank while you make a pit stop, then get back on the way. No, absolutely not. They take you to a city where you don’t want to go in the first place, then kick you out of the plane and send you to find another airplane on which to catch a ride. And apparently, when I wasn’t paying attention, a law was passed which states that your connecting flight shall be leaving from a gate that is to be “no less than 1 mile from your arrival gate, and if the airport is made up of multiple terminals, the departure gate must then be located in the terminal farthest from the arrival gate. Furthermore, all passengers should be subjected to a minimum of 1 delay or 2 gate changes per trip.

    It’s a good thing I like walking and don’t mind the exercise. The hurry up and wait thing, however, I could certainly do without.

    So, by now I am sure you have guessed that this is pretty much what happened with my most recent trip to Ohio. And, if you guessed that, give yourself a cigar. If you didn’t, scroll back up and look at the flight plan graphic. Notice how the arrows are aligned to make an infinity symbol? Well, that’s not just a coincidence, because I was the guest of the airline for something on the order of forever.

    And, it all began like this…

    I started out my day like any other Friday. Up at 5:30 AM, taking out the trash, cleaning the litter boxes, grabbing a shower, packing lunch for E K, getting her majesty and the O-spring out to work and school respectively, etc… After all of that, courtesy of a ride provided by my publicist, by 11:55 AM I was finally sitting at my gate at Lambert Saint Louis International Airport. Now, I would like to say that Lambert has become more efficient, but that simply isn’t the case. What has happened is that so many airlines have moved their hubs away from Saint Louis that we no longer have anywhere near the volume we once had. Therefore, even though I pared down the “arrive 2 hours ahead of your flight time” to 1 1/2 hours, I still had better than an hour before my flight because checking in and getting through security was a breeze. Since I had this wait, and was scheduled for only a short layover at my connection, I decided I had better eat something now while I had a chance.

    This seemed like a good idea at the time, however the concourse where my gate happened to be had been undergoing renovations. Now, this will likely be a good thing once finished, but at that particular point in time it meant my choices were limited. I could pick between booze, Star-Make-A-Bucks, some pizza outfit that had a 100 yard long line of people in front of it, or the pre-made sandwich cooler nearby.

    Not wanting booze, a danish, or to stand in line, I was pretty much hamstrung. I stood in front of the open faced refrigerator and perused my options. Ham and cheese on whole wheat, or chicken on ciabatta. Ham, chicken… Whole wheat, ciabatta… The debate inside my head raged on for several minutes. Finally I flipped a mental coin and reached for a sandwich. In the end I had the rubber chicken on sawdust bread with wilted lettuce, and an orange juice. If I could believe the label on my sandwich it had been made fresh that day – somewhere in the state of Maryland. Made fresh or not, it didn’t take long for me to conclude that the trip from Maryland to Missouri didn’t exactly agree with it. But, I choked it down anyway, and then cried just a little. I mean, after all, I had just consumed a really horrid $1.25 chicken sandwich. Personally, I really didn’t feel like it was truly worth $1.25, and that just made it all the more sad since I had paid $7.49 for the privilege of gnawing on it. Don’t even get me started on the OJ. I suppose it might have actually been worth the $4.49 for the 12-ounce bottle, given that it had fermented a bit and now contained alcohol. However, I tend to take my screwdrivers a bit less “ripe” if you know what I mean…

    Looking back, this was one of the better parts of my travel experience that day, because you see, the minute we boarded the airplane this leg of my trip inevitably fell into the bend over and grab your ankles vortex

    More to come…

    Murv

    Next Installment: I Thought 7:11 Was A Convenience Store…

  • Googleified, Redux…

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    I suppose I’m a bit of a voyeur in some respects. I think all authors are. We watch the world around us with a kind of personal fascination. Everything we see becomes fodder for a book somewhere along the line. Maybe not right that minute, but perhaps in the future. We tend to log these things away in the darkened corners of our brains just in case we might need them.

    I am guess it is because of the whole “voyeurism” thing that I keep tabs on the search phrases and words that land folks at my website and blog. Yeah, sure, it initially started out as one of those optimization things. You know, using tags and keywords that brought me traffic. But, I figured out early on that web-traffic isn’t always good. If it isn’t qualified traffic, it is just eating up your bandwidth for nothing. Kinda like trying to sell a high-end TV to a homeless person. They don’t have money, or even a place to put it, so you’re working a dead lead…

    Damn… I’m having a flashback to my days in sales at VideoConcepts… Now I need a drink…

    But, let’s see if we can move on… Like I said, I figured out early on that some of this keyword stuff really does you little good. Unfortunately, in some cases, even though it is a valid keyword that actually has plenty to do with the blog post, there are searches going on out there that seize upon it for different reasons, yet again driving unqualified traffic your way. Such was the case with the word “handcuffs”. You see, when I wrote that little piece of Twitter Flash Fiction and posted it here to my blog, it contained the word handcuffs. It also had a picture associated with it. Very suddenly, and without warning, my blog started receiving all kinds of traffic. I mean, insane amounts of traffic. From all over the world, even.

    The problem was, all of it was people looking for pictures of handcuffs via Google Image Search. They were never coming to the blog. They were merely hotlinking the image.

    Not exactly qualified traffic, know what I mean?

    So, anyway, I got that all cleared up by changing some keywords, jpg names, and petitioning google to remove a couple of now-nonexistent links. It took a week or so, but finally it was done.

    But, of course, the handcuffs aren’t why I called you here today. You see, since I skulk around peeking through virtual curtains and the search phrases which bring folks to my blog, I thought maybe I’d share a few of the more esoteric entries with you. So, here goes…

    • Clark Kent

    Why Superman’s alter ego brought someone to my blog I have no idea.

    • John Glenn Moon 1962

    John Glenn I understand. I did, after all, write a blog on my birthday which mentions him rather prominently given that I was born on the day he orbited the Earth in Friendship 7. However, simply reading that phrase makes me wish I had a slice of the action, because my guess is that someone was trying to verify facts for a bet. BTW, NO Virginia, John Glenn never went to the Moon. Now pay up.

    • Bound Pentagram Sacrifice Nude Virgin

    I’m sure all of these words connected up with various key elements of the sample chapters from the RGI series I have here on the site. But, something tells me that’s not what they were looking for, and that just scares me.

    • Wife In Stockings
    • Sagging Stockings
    • Women In Seamed Stockings
    • feeling your stockings

    Of course, all of these landed on the page “Fool For Your Stockings...” from the Mahwage blog series. Again, I don’t think that’s what these Googlers were looking for…

    • how to deal with a pain in the ass wife

    This one brought the searcher to “E K Is A Real Pain In My Ass…” for obvious reasons. I have to wonder if his so called “pain in the ass wife” checks his search history when he isn’t around. If she does and ends up back here she needs to contact E K. Something tells me The Evil One could give her some pointers on how to deal with her “pain in the ass husband”.

    • “regular housewife”

    My guess is, this is what the numb-nuts above is looking for. But where’s the fun in that?

    • I damaged my ass
    • what is pain on my butt
    • pains in my right ass cheek
    • my butt aches after I take a crap

    I like to call these the “pain in the ass” searches. Again, they ended up at the most recently mentioned entry, which I am sure was of no help to them whatsoever. But (pun intended with extreme prejudice) I have to say, I’m a bit concerned for the person whose butt aches after defecation. That doesn’t sound good at all… I have to admit I’m also just a bit curious about the “I damaged my ass” person.

    • nathan fillion practical jokes

    This one had me momentarily stumped until I remembered I had written a blog about Fillion’s new show, Castle

    • bad ass bitch in heels
    • devil angel redhead
    • devil woman
    • heels, ass, biker

    Where the whole “biker” thing came in, I have no idea. But, these quite obviously landed the Googlers on just about anything where E K is mentioned, but most especially the “Somehow Satan Got Behind Me…” blog, due to the included “devil woman” graphic. I’m sure they were looking for much more explicit pictures and didn’t really find anything that fit what they REALLY wanted, but if they took time to read the blog entries themselves… Well… They might be afraid now. I know I would be.

    • sindromul edison
    • pagkain

    What good would a search keyword log be without some gibberish as translated from another language. Other than Edison (This is Edison Carter… blog entry…) I have no clue what they were after…

    • novel peanut butter dan jelly

    My kid used to watch a cartoon called P B and J Otter. But, I can’t imagine there being a novel. Also, I am going to assume that is supposed to be “and jelly”… Because if it’s actually supposed to be “Dan Jelly”… Well… Given the possible connotations, I just don’t wanna know… At least they didn’t type in jam…

    • before after combover makeover

    I’ll go bald before I do a combover. Enough said.

    • ass animation
    • Butt Cheek Images
    • men getting spanked

    Here we have the second round of “ass searches” which brought folks to the “E K Is A Real yadda yadda…” blog, again quite obviously because of that lovely three letter word. I grouped them together for that very reason, although I think #3 had a something different in mind as compared to #’s 1 and 2. In this case, due to the joke and cartoon at the beginning, #3 might have actually found what he or she was after…

    Something I found to be of particular note is the fact that the vast majority of the searches for #3, or some permutation thereof, such as “women who spank” or “wifes (sic) spanking husbands” come out of the UK, France, and Italy, in that order.  At least, that’s what the IP addresses say. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

    • Paranormally Warped

    Unknown to this poor internet searcher, all he or she needed to do was type in M. R. Sellars to get this… Of course, it doesn’t matter. All paranormal warpedness leads straight to me anyway… :lol:

    • Satan Poke Poor Soul

    I have theories, but they make my brain hurt…

    So, there you have it… Yet another round of Google weirdness that brings people right here to Murv Weirdness.  I guess those search engines actually do work…

    More to come…

    Murv