Top ten and coincidences

I haven't caught up with my HitTail results for a while, so, having had a reminder from them yesterday, I thought I'd check out what's hot in regard to the top ten keywords.  These top ten words are apparently 15.6% of all my search traffic.

HitTail suggests only one phrase as a keyword this week: random film free, a rather odd phrase, you'd think.  But apparently people have picked this blog up as a result. I tried it, and this blog didn't get listed until the third page - admittedly there were only ten results per page, so that's probably not bad.

Apart from that, and the fact that putting in random film free might not have helped the searcher a great deal when he or she came across my blog, here are the top ten results.  Nine of them are old favourites; only one is a bit out of left field, and that's number four on the list, which comes up as googleads.g.doubleclick.net.  Now I can't imagine anyone putting that in as a search, so it's plainly something a machine has done.  Good luck to it; when I put it in as a search I get the brush-off from Google.  

Zirka Circus review tops the list this time around, with Zirka Circus coming second.  I must be one of the few people to have written about the Zirka Circus, which is why I'm so popular!

Athlete's hand comes third, and bingo! Mike Crowl comes fifth.  The Great Divorce notes comes sixth - people still picking up something I wrote about C S Lewis' Great Divorce at some point and Google matching it up with the title of my blog.  Chrissy Popadics is, as always, on the list, followed by Frederick Buechner marriage.  Penultimately there's James Berardinelli, whom I haven't written about for more months than there are in a year, and probably longer; in fact, I haven't even read much of Berardinelli in the same time.   And finally there's another old favourite: skinny tie (skinny ties is thirteenth on the list.)  It's interesting that the image for the skinny ties post and a photo of Berardinelli appear in the 'Popular Posts' list down the right hand column.  Zirka Circus is there too, and Buechner, so I guess these are there because there are so many searches for them.  Chrissy Popadics appears under her married name of Johnson in this list.  It's kind of a circle really, isn't it?  People search for the thing so the posts become popular, and the popular posts get searched.  Hmm.  

That's just my top ten list, of course.  The list goes on forever, whittling its way down from nearly 300 hits for each search item to just one.  HitTail's reason for existing is to point out the little words that people search for so that you can make more of these; it's the counter approach to the way most SOEs work.  I could look up all these little words, but I thought I'd stick to a simpler task and check out what words or phrases have been searched for today that brought the searcher in touch with my blog.  There are four: betty boop on stage, oscar wilde on art, into the open air sheet music, charles horton cooley.  Charles Horton Who?  

I didn't think I'd ever written about this bloke, but I have.  Considering that I don't appear anywhere near the top on the search results it's surprising anyone found this site, and it's surprising that HitTail says they did.  But there you go.  I remember writing about Betty Boop, but again she doesn't appear in the search results unless I put some connector, like mike crowl.  

The Oscar Wilde reference is there, again requiring some additional input, but into the open air sheet music turns up easily without additional words; fourth on the list, in fact.  And here's a nice coincidence.  Years ago I wrote a post on Boise, which happened to mention Chrissy Popadics.  Boise doesn't turn up in my HitTail results very readily, but Chrissy does all the time.  The coincidence is that my daughter-in-law comes from Boise, and now lives in Minneapolis with my son.  The post that turns up in relation to open air sheet music tells me that the sheet music in question - painted onto a building - is in Minneapolis. 

Moms, Boop, arm-wrestling and athlete's foot

My son now has an American mother-in-law, and in due course, if he carries on the way he's gone so far, he'll soon be forgetting his New Zealand roots and saying and spelling her name, 'Mom' rather than 'Mum.'

Hopefully, when Christmas next comes round he'll have "gift ideas Mom" on his little list, otherwise he might be hearing from his Mom quick smart...!   Nah, she's not that sort of mother-in-law....

We've missed hearing from him and his new wife since they moved to Minneapolis a few days after the wedding.  They haven't been able to get broadband on in their apartment (flat to you Kiwis) even though it was supposed to be supplied by last Friday their time.   [Why do we call a place to stay a flat?  It's a very odd use of the word when you think about it.]   And talking of flats the musical director of the show I wrote, Grimhilda! has also been having trouble getting broadband installed in his new flat (apartment to you Yankees), so he and I have been communicating via texts and mobile calls mostly.   At least he answers his mobile.   It always irritated me that my son - the one who's just got married - would never answer his mobile.  It always switched to the 'leave a message' section within seconds.  One of those quirks, I guess, of human nature.

Recently I've been getting a regular email from HitTail with updates telling me what words people are looking at on my blog.  I often find these a little curious: usually they will be the same few words or phrases that have been popular since I began the blog, but every so often I get a list such as the one below where the words/phrases are from posts that have hardly achieved notoriety on my blog.

betty boop  blogs
armwrestling my wife
common horse liniment  


Betty Boop has only ever appeared once on my blog, as far as I can tell, and that was when I posted a video of one of the old Betty Boop cartoons and made some comments about it.  It was hardly a spectacular post.   [That's Betty being her usual coy self, in the picture on the right.]

The second phrase also turns up in only one post, intriguingly entitled: Arm-wrestling Feminist.  This has been a more popular post, though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect from the title.  I still love the line that was part of a paragraph I quoted from a World Council of Churches document: I came to a greater awareness of my gendered self when I lost to her in arm-wrestling. I stopped arm-wrestling with my wife in the presence of my kids.  Coming to an awareness of one's gendered self via arm-wrestling strikes me as a strange way to realise who you are, gender-wise.   


The last phrase connects up with a very popular phrase that leads people to my blog: athlete's hand (or foot).  The horse liniment reference comes in a story told by Dale Ralph Davis about an enterprising salesman who found that while horse liniment was a good cure for what we now know as 'athlete's foot', it didn't sell well while it was being promoted as a cure for ringworm.  The salesman invented the phrase, athlete's foot, and the horse liniment sold like a bomb.   The liniment, by the way, which goes by the name of Absorbine, is still sold today, 118 years after it first appeared.  I don't know that it's sold as a cure for athlete's foot, anymore, though the container in which it appears as a foot remedy for horses (under the name of Hooflex) looks remarkably like the one in which Gran's Remedy is sold here in New Zealand (as a cure for athlete's foot).  

Open-air sheet music

Couldn't resist putting this photo on here, after my comments about sheet music in the last post.


It looks like something that's been photoshopped, but apparently it's for real. (It was taken by 'Tape') It's in Minneapolis, on the former Schmitt Music Building. Another Flickr.com photographer (I think they go under the pseudonym of O So Lazy Susan) has a heap of pictures of it from different angles. This photographer notes:
This musical mural is believed to be sheet music from a portion of Maurice Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. I heard there was some major copyright issues once upon a time, but that is just a rumour. Schmitt Music used to be housed in the building. The music store is gone, but the mural remains.

I'm glad people are photographing this, because it's just the sort of thing some demolition person would come along and destroy in a matter of moments.