BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

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

Continued From:

Who Is This, And How Did You Get In My Computer? PART 1…

The modem had finally negotiated a compatible communications protocol and was “speaking” to another device somewhere. For all I knew, that somewhere was halfway around the world, or just right next door – remember, Caller ID was just an idea from the land of Sci-Fi back then…

I waited impatiently for what was going to happen next… Having seen Wargames more than once – I did work at a video store, after all – I was pretty much bracing myself for some idiot to type in “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” then tell me his name was Joshua and that he controlled all of the nuclear missiles in the country. If that happened, I was going to be even less happy than I already was.

The screen cleared and the phosphor green cursor winked at me from the upper left corner of the monitor. I sat watching, my hands in my lap and one eyebrow raised as I waited for something more to appear. After what seemed like a full thirty seconds had passed, the cursor dropped down two lines on the screen of its own accord, as if some phantom had just hit the enter key twice.

A second or two later, one laborious letter at a time, the word “hello” appeared.

I was still perturbed, but now I was also slightly curious. Obviously I had a live person at the other end, and I was assuming they were aware that they had one too. After all, they had just kept calling and calling until they managed a connection, so this apparently fit into their plan somewhere along the line.

Of course, I did have one thing going through my mind. BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems – a precursor to the Internet) were seriously gaining popularity around this time. I, myself, frequented several, and while I ended up actually hosting and running one a few months after this incident, I wasn’t doing so at that moment. Of course, someone with a number close to mine could have been, and this could all be a matter of a mis-dial. This would mean the person at the other end might be just as confused as me right now since there was no welcome screen or login prompt being displayed.

I stared at the glowing word on the screen a moment longer. The thing was, BBS popularity was big among the 11-14 year old crowd, so I really needed to avoid typing back a string of expletives damning this person for interrupting my night, lest it be some tween with a Commodore 64 who would go running to mommy and daddy screaming that some guy at XXX-XXXX telephone number was cussing at him.

Keeping this in mind, I rested my fingers on the keys. “Hello,” I typed back, much faster than my mystery caller had. Of course, I typed around 85wpm back then. Now, it’s more like 60wpm. Arthritis seriously sucks… But, I digress…

The person at the other end slowly typed again, “hello”.

I rolled my eyes. It seemed I didn’t have a rocket scientist calling me, so the likelihood of it being a tween with a hastily – and incorrectly – scrawled BBS number from a buddy at school instantly grew.

I set my fingers flying across the keyboard once again. “Sorry, but this number isn’t a BBS. It’s the number for a private individual.”

I waited for a response.

It came. “ya so”

Apparently the mystery tween was also a smartass who didn’t have a shift key or a grasp of punctuation. The latter two, while irritating, I could forgive. The first one, not so much… So, not really having patience for that sort of thing – I was young, remember…not that I have all that much patience for it now either, but I was much worse back then – I control-keyed myself over to the command menu and disconnected the call without bothering to type an answer.

Now, the thing about modems is this – they only do what they have been told to do. And, back then (even today for that matter, though it is far more transparent than it was in the good ol’ days) you would generally tell them to do something with what was called an “AT” command. Why? Because all commands started with the letters “AT” of course, which more or less stood for “ATTENTION”… So, it was pretty much “Attention modem, do this” – although it took the form of commands like ATA (Attention modem: Answer) or ATS13=0 (Attention modem: set bit on register 13 to zero – essentially “off”… binary and all that jazz…)

My point here is that with the exception of telling the modem to disconnect the annoying a$$wipe kid who was connected, the last thing I had told the device to do was initialize in the Auto Answer mode. Since I had not “reset” any registers, as far as it was concerned, it was going to answer the phone.

So, when the phone inevitably rang again, it did what it was intent on doing.

I suppose I could have picked up the phone, or  quickly entered a re-init code before the third ring had sounded, but I didn’t. I just muttered, “Little f*cking bastard,” and sat there as the system connected and warbled through a fresh protocol negotiation.

The screen cleared and I was faced with “hello” once again.

I keyed in, “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“no” was the response.

I typed back, “Some of us have to go to work in the morning.”

“ya me to,” my mystery caller laboriously returned. (BTW, I am misspelling my mystery caller’s entries as close to the way they were misspelled as I can remember.)

I raised an eyebrow… Okay, either I had an adult or a lying tween. I was leaning toward lying tween, but one never knew. You still don’t these days. Susie Silky Thighs in the hot sex chat room could be a 52 year old drunk guy sitting there in his underwear pulling his pud for all you know. I think there was even a viral video out on the net where someone used that idea for a commercial or something… Yeah, I know… Oh look, a chicken… (I really, really do think that chicken thing is friggin’ hilarious…) Oh, and BTW, I don’t hang out in hot sex chatrooms… I’m married to E K, so why would I bother? My ex-boss did, however, and probably still does… yeah, ‘nother blog.

So, anyway, mystery caller says he/she has to go to work in the morning too.

“Okay, so don’t you think it’s bedtime?” I typed back.

“not yet,” was the reply. “what ar you dooing”

“Getting annoyed,” I replied.

“ya”

I decided to ask the obvious question. “Who is this?”

“you no” came across the screen.

I replied, “Obviously I don’t or I wouldn’t have asked.”

By way of a response I got, “pool open yet”

This one gave me pause. Obviously this was someone who knew me, or  at the very least knew I had a pool. If it was one of my friends then they already knew whether or not the pool was open, so I couldn’t imagine them asking such a question. I turned in my seat to look around at my windows. The blinds were drawn so I didn’t figure I was being watched, unless this whack job on the other end had X-ray vision or something. I allowed my gaze to linger for a moment on the headboard of the bed where I had my loaded .357 magnum stashed. I considered getting it out and laying it beside the keyboard, but thought maybe that was being just a bit too paranoid.

“Who is this?” I typed again, none to excited about the creepy stalker feeling I was now getting.

“i see you tammarow” was the only answer I received before the modem clicked and the call disconnected.

I sat for nearly an hour waiting for another call, but it never came.

Before finally climbing back into bed I saw to it that I checked the load on my pistol and shifted it to be within reaching distance if something awakened me unexpectedly… You know, like a psycho killer stalker or something, know what I mean?

The next morning I was still ruminating over the whole incident, and doing a lot of looking over my shoulder as well. I called all my friends with computer equipment and asked them if they were screwing with me, to which I received believable answers to the negative. I told my co-workers about it and even a couple of my regular customers who had become slightly more than acquaintances but not quite good friends. They all agreed that it was a bit weird, and one even suggested I contact the police. Of course, even then I knew better than to believe the cops would do anything about it. I mean, after all, what could they do other than take a report? That way there would be a paper trail when my corpse was found hanging from a swing set in the park with my hands chopped off, or some oddball crap like that.

Yeah… big help…

It was sometime after lunch – mid afternoon as I recall – when Scott Ruddle wandered into the store and listened to me tell the story.  (In case you are new here, or don’t remember previous references to Scott, he ended up being my best man when E K and I married. He’s also the person upon whom the character Detective Benjamin Storm, from the RGI novels, is based… Yeah, that Scott Ruddle…) So, anyway, this was well prior to the beer can tossing… (see: There I was, Just Sitting By The Pool…) In fact, we had only just recently met and the friendship we eventually developed hadn’t even officially been launched just yet. At this point he was one of those “pretty good acquaintance – semi almost friend” types. As he stood there nodding his head and adding an occasional “no sh*t?” to let me know he really was listening, it suddenly dawned on me.

I stopped mid sentence and stared at him, then started shaking my head. “You friggin’ bastard,” I said.

No longer able to contain himself he started laughing.

And, so began my psyche damaging, sometimes very odd, but lasting and incredibly true friendship with Sergeant Scott Ruddle and his wife.

Now you know why I’m just a bit addled in the head…

And, yeah… Now he’s a cop. Like I’ve said before, welcome to my world…

More to come…

Murv