Crowl or Crawl

Courtesy Pixabay

Trawling through Evernote, I came across a piece I wrote in 2007. It was published on an internet site that faded away through not being able to pay its writers on time...Since it's a piece poking fun at blogs and their writers, I thought it could do with another airing:

Crowl or Crawl

In one of those idle moments when the brain is parked in a lay-by, I typed my surname into the search engine on Blogger.com. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a number of people had typed ‘crowl’ instead of ‘crawl’ and had never noticed (who apart from me proof-reads their blog scribblings?), but seeing my name leap out from some of the most random writing on the planet was disconcerting.

It even turns up in foreign language texts. Is it a slang word that crosses borders? Many blog writers don’t have too cosy a relationship with grammar and spelling. We can excuse those for whom English is a second language: “I want to know does search engines crowl websites without submission. Should website important to submit to Search engines. I have some website for promotion so I want to know that Search engine will not crowl without submission.”  

At least I hope this is a writer for whom English is a second language.   

The next writer, however, has style: “I'm detached. I don't want to do anything with this ugly politics anymore. If I'm lucky I'll find a hole in some quiet corner of the world and crowl there and continue my research on Machine Translation and live my own life and don't care a bit about anything that happens anywhere. If I see a needy, I'll help. But I'll forget dying African kids, and greedy thiefs of higher society... Let them do anything they want.”

Perhaps the next writer was too troubled by his angst to notice where his fingers were flying: “I woke up and I looked into the mirror and standing there was someone else...Not me. I have to say that I really didn't like what I saw. What happened with the VERY confident guy that used to stare back at me and say: "Today will be a great day!!"???  I really don't know...What I saw there, in the mirror, was a fraction of what I used to see...My walk has fallen into a crowl...I didn’t want to fall straight into a halt... If that happens I might as well just curl and die...I have never been so close to His will and then everything just piled up trying to tumble me to my knees and admit defeat... But I think I've got some news for ya...I won't give up and I will be at the centre of His will! God...I know things won't be easy... Help me...I think I might be losing my mind...”

Of course, losing your mind, let alone feeling you’ve fallen out with God, may well be the result of falling into a crowl.

And more on the religious life of the teenager: “Today—Monday, July 10, 2006—was a day of relaxation. We slept in and had pancakes for breakfast and then had morning worship and Pray the Bible. After lunch we had Salvationism class (which was really eye-opening to what we need to change in the world). The girls got into an in-depth discussion on today’s RevoDevos of Exodus 19 and 20 and the Ten Commandments and the Articles of War. After dinner we had a Salvationist Missionary/Teacher visit us and talk to us about her 10 month adventure in China. It was extremely inspiring to get out there and do missions. Last night the girls decided to go to Starbucks and then have a “discussion” and because of that the boys decided they wanted a “boy’s night out” as well. As soon as the boys left campus we girls went to Cozy’s for our second dinner. Side note: Thai food is good.”

I began to wonder if many people pronounce ‘crawl’ as ‘crowl’ and have a mistaken view of its spelling. “It seems like my blog has been forgotten again. But in the past 2.5 weeks I was glad if I had the energy to crowl into bed when I got home.”  

Or: “I don't dispute her assessment. It's pretty evident that the forces that brought Summers down were not monolithic and many people found themselves in a firm opposition to him due to a variety of reasons. But still, it doesn't dispel the gloom that comes from the realization that if even such a powerful man as Larry Summers had to crowl acquiescently, rather than stood by his remarks, and was still brought down, the perspectives of simple mortals are that bleak.” 

You have to wonder how a person who uses words like ‘monolithic’ and ‘acquiescently’ appears to have no idea about tense. 

Someone who may be teaching dressmaking writes the following: “At the top that blob like thing would be a pinned on flower of some sort. At the bottom, the sides would be runched up and have ties. The effect given is kind of like a crowl neck, only at the bottom.   More of that crowl neck effect, but just a little tighter, so it wouldn’t be overly exaggerated.   Split sleeves. A sheer see-through material overtop the bottom material, adding a bit of extra length.”  I’ve always had a ‘crowl neck’ of course, but it’s usually at the top, rather than the bottom.  

Here’s someone on the history of swimming: “The first literatures about swimming are dated since the 2000 B.C. However it wasn't since the 1800 the first competitions started taking place in Europe. Back then the most popular style was the breaststroke. The most popular and fast style, the front crowl, was first introduced in the so called civilized world, by John Arthur Trudgen, in 1878 who saw it from the natives Americans.”  

Oh, communication, wherefore art thou?

And finally a person who hasn’t yet discovered the shift key: “what an amazing moment.  i tripped and fell today. i ripped my jeans, skinned my knees and killed my toe...it hurts real bad.  everyone looked at me, good thing kate was with me, its always more sad when someone is alone and they fall. but i owned it and it was pretty much amazing. it almost made me late to crowl the warrior king's final. that wouldnt have been good. he was wearing jeans today and it was pretty awkward. but you dont know him so you probably dont really care. well sara knows him. im sure she will agree that its awkward.”

I’m sure she will….and not just the falling over.

Footnote: 

All these are unedited extracts from blogs. My thanks to the people who unwittingly offered their writings...

Google side alleys and back corners

Years ago I wrote a piece about the way in which many people spell the word crawl (as in a baby learning to crawl) as crowl, which of course is my surname - it was while I was searching Google that I discovered this fairly common error. For a long time  I couldn't find that article, then it turned up on my Evernote files, and I transferred a tidier copy of it to this blog. 

My search that resulted in discovering the connections between crowl and crawl started because I was looking up my own name on Google. Self-indulgent, you might say, but I'm the sort of person who quite often sits down to check what's turns up on Google when I put my name in. I also like to check out the results when I look up my books. I'm sure there are other things to do in life, but sometimes this turns up some interesting stuff, the sorts of things you'd never otherwise discover.

For instance, I put the words Disenchanted Wizard in the search box today, because that's the name of my latest book, and I wanted to see where it was appearing on the Net. One of the things I discovered is that Kobo has a list of books with the word disenchanted in their titles, and my book is among them. Thanks, Kobo! (I've only just noticed that another book, Reviving Old Scratch, which I read last year, and which I lent to a friend just yesterday, is also on this list, because its subtitle is Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted.)

I also discovered that a writer named Keith Timson, who, coincidentally was born in the same year as me - 1945 - had written a short story called The Disenchanted Wizard that appeared in a magazine called Dark Horizons, in 1991. Nice that he chose to give my book some advertising over 25 years before it was written!

And of course I found that The Disenchanted Wizard turns up on some rather suspect sites, where they're trying to give my book away for free when they don't have any right to do so. When I clocked on on of those sites, the response was 'refusing to answer Google's inquiry.'  LOL

There's also a list of all my books on a site called Medical Books. Okay. Not sure of the connection there, although admittedly the non-fiction title, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, is somewhat medical. Each of the books, which all appear twice in this list, have blio beside them. Presumably blio.com is one of the distributors of the books. But that still doesn't explain the Medical Books aspect of things. Still it's nice to be turning up in all sorts of places!

One of Kobo's Asian sites is advertising TDW. Wow! I'm world famous!!

But perhaps the oddest search result came up as 'PDF Read [Southern Book] - Diary of a Prostate Wimp - Kitchens R Us. When I clicked on the link it said that the page wasn't found but it brought up the Kitchens R Us page anyway, on which there is nothing about either Prostate Wimp or Disenchanted Wizard, rather to my disappointment. I'd love to know how the two were connected, and why my latest book brought them together.

Does Google do an automatic crawl?

For years I was put off automatic cars because of the trouble we had with the original automatic we owned. It was a lovely car - can't remember the model, but it was white (if that's any help!), and I was using it to drive round Dunedin while I sold brushes for Bon Brushes. One of my less inspiring occupations.
The lovely white automatic broke down one day and was pronounced beyond repair, because, supposedly in those days, once the automatic bit went the car had had it. Despair and much gnashing of teeth. Fortunately some friends of ours lent us a little Mini for the interim until we managed to get our own car again. (I can't remember how we managed that, now, but we must have done it some how.)
We now own another automatic, a Mitsubishi Chariot, and we've been assured that the days of automatics breaking down beyond repair are long gone. I was reminded of all this because I was just reading about steering racks, and thought I'd check up on the Chariot's while I was there.
I don't actually have any idea what a steering rack is, and the site didn't make me any the wiser -except that it's obviously something that makes the steering work, in some way.
Someone who won't be any the wiser either is the person who put in the search query: I want to know how Google crowl. Now I'm flattered about this, except he was obviously asking how Google crawled. Yet again people don't know how to spell a simple word and consequently make themselves more confused than ever!

More hitting the top spots

‘How to crowl in a right way’ – this search request from a country that spells ‘did you mean’ as ‘Tarkoititko’. Interestingly enough, when you put ‘tarkoititko’ in Google, along with Mike Crowl, it asks: did you mean Tarkoitetaan? Whatever language it is, it’s subtle! More to the point, the original request brought up this blog at the top. Must be a week for it!
Google is brilliant at finding what you want, but it’s also brilliant at finding things that are so far from what you want that you wonder how it got there. Still, that’s the way search engines function, pretty much.
Somebody else was looking for my old friend, Arnold Bachop, the tenor. Just doing that brought up this blog twice, in first and second place, and then another post of mine on my older website.
Someone else wants to know about the waterfall scene in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me. I certainly don’t mention it anywhere in the post I wrote on that film, even though we came third in the Google stakes on that one. In fact, I don’t remember a waterfall scene in the movie at all.
Veno’s Lighting Cough Bottles was the next search query, and we came in number two on that, for once actually having all the words in the search query actually turn up in the same post! To my surprise the same thing happens with the query: Diana Crowl music. Google thought the best thing on offer was my post on Gerald Finzi, in which all three of those words appear, but which probably has nothing to do with what the searcher wanted.
We drop down the list in regard to a query about Generation C, but we’re still in the top ten. Somehow we go to the top of the list again with ‘I hate to sit up straight’ – a query that boggles the mind as to why you’d want to say such a thing to Google in the first place. (Actually in this instance they said it to AOL search. AOL search – who are they? Perhaps AOL had been telling one of its customers to sit up straight? It’s the sort of restrictive thing they’re into, I think.)
To my amazement I’m in the top ten for ‘dating for everyone’, something that I’d hardly have thought to have written about, but apparently did, as I also did about religious jeans. How do I get into these sidetracks?
Back to number four for Franklin Taylor, that irritant to my Mozart playing. He was the editor of the edition of Mozart sonatas I’m currently playing from, and does some unbelievably silly things in terms of adding expression marks. Still, he was working in a period when the editors seemed to think they knew best about everything, including how Mozart would have added expression marks if he’d had the time. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on J S Bach. He was just as bad, complaining that Bach hadn’t done this, had done that and shouldn’t have, and so on. Schweitzer might have been a fairly clever chappie, but at 25 or so, he was hardly a match for the genius of J S B. Guess that’s the arrogance of youth.
Another composer turns up in the HitTail lists (that’s what I’m checking at the moment, in case you hadn’t figured it out). It’s our old friend Gareth Farr. The searcher apparently thought his name was double-barrelled: Gareth-Farr. Unfortunately that would leave Gareth without a first name, and what would his friends call him then?
And nearly last on our list tonight is yet another composer, this time, John Adams, he of the minimalist music. He whom I haven’t quite given room enough to grow accustomed to yet. And may still do so!
Finally, we get back to another request for crawling spelt as crowling. This time it’s ‘crowls in the water’. Well, we had Crowls in the water this morning, because both my wife and I had a bath. Does that count?

The Write Advertising

Ever thought about what you might put on a pen if you had the chance to do it for free? You know the sort of thing I mean: advertising pens, the kind that get given away by firms in the hope that you’ll remember them every time you do some writing. Remember them instead of the competition, who’s also given you a free pen.
But if you were given a 1000 pens that you could your own individual message on, what might you say? Jesus Loves Me? Mike Crowl Blogs Way Too Much? Everyone Deserves a Sabbatical?
I’m sure you can come up with some other ideas – let me know…it’s some time since anyone commented on anything in here! (boo hoo)
Looking through my HitTail results, it’s possible you could use one of the following enigmatic phrases: How Tall is Denzil Washington? Branson, Music Capital of the World. I’m an In-Law. The Endless Itching of Athletes’ Foot.
Just while I’m on the subject of HitTail search results, here’s one that’s really off-the-wall, and a little scary: All sort of home kitchen crowl insect.
When will people learn that Crowl isn’t the spelling of Crawl?

Gulp! Gareth Farr Naked!

Latest HitTails' key words:

Postie.con
Gareth Farr naked
Portmanteau word boat
Triond
Crowl
swim (arabic)
Howard shore kong score

HitTails continue to intrigue. It’s perhaps fortunate that I don’t get a lot of keywords popping up from them, as I’d never get anything else posted here. Not to worry, what does come up is well worth a look.
Gareth Farr Naked. Well, I’ve never written about poor old Gareth Farr and nudity in the same sentence, so this one was a bit of a surprise. I’m not sure what the original searcher was looking for, but I don’t think it was Farr’s lack of clothing. And, rather hilariously, the response that Google got from my page combines two different posts together: one about Farr and one a quote from Michael Gurr in which the word ‘naked’ appears.
There seems to be a fascination with ‘portmanteau word’ and boat. But the interesting thing is that in Google’s responses there are three of my posts listed in the first five. Maybe HitTails’s onto more than we suspect!
The ‘crowl swim’ search was really for crawl swim and came from an Arabic site. But it isn’t only non-English speaking people who make this mistake and use my name for that of a type of swimming. Plenty of US bloggers write ‘crowl’ for ‘crawl.’ Must be a pronunciation issue. I’ve written an article about this which now appears on the Triond circuit.
Triond of course is the place I’ve got a number of articles listed at, and I managed to make the second page with Google’s responses for this one, which is quite something. And got two showings to boot.
‘Howard Shore kong score’ brought up my page somewhere way down the list. That’s okay. Merely to be in the Google listings is a major achievement these days.