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.

Musicians, singers, athlete's fingers, et al

The Hittails reports continue to intrigue me, and are actually interesting in terms of what they dredge up. Here’s the most recent list.
How to find trade me members
Boat for workers
Anna Leese Maggie Teyte
Sings Harry Douglas Lilburn
Giles Hatterley Dawkins
Athletes hand athletes foot
Gareth Farr blog
The finding of Trade Me members is an interesting one. Certainly not a ‘key word’ phrase I’d have thought of. Euqally, the mysterious ‘boat for workers’ while it follows on my portmanteau comments, is odd. I’m not sure of the intentions of a person looking for a boat for workers. Some suspect character wanting to find a cheap boat to ship some refugees?
Anna Leese and the Maggie Teyte prize were only written about in the last few days, so I caught that one pretty quick!
My not-so-favourite composer Douglas Lilburn gets a look in, this time via Sings Harry, a song cycle I played with a friend of mine, Brent Read, a few years back. It has a rather skimpy accompaniment, I feel, perhaps because it was written for the guitar originally (if I have my facts right), but it is actually a piece of Lilburn’s I could be said to ‘enjoy’ – just. Brent is the tenor I wrote four songs for which he performed last year at a concert I put on. One of the world’s as yet undiscovered great voices!
I’d forgotten about the Hattersley/Dawkins connection – Mr Dawkins is another one of those people whose contribution to the humanities I don’t have a lot of time for, but here is, turning up on my doorstep again.
I’m not sure why someone would go looking for ‘athletes hand athletes foot’, but they did, and apparently this blog turned up in the results, in my athlete’s fingers post.
I’ve written about Gareth Farr more than on this blog, and will probably write about him again. There you go, Hittail!

Portmanteau Post

The HitTails program, while not giving me a large number of results, does throw up some intriguing ‘key words’ that people are supposed to have been looking up. I mentioned ‘portmanteau word’ the other day, but somehow ‘portmanteau boat’ is now a favoured search option. I’ve never heard of a portmanteau boat, and neither has Google – I’m afraid I never bother with any other search engine these days – but it sounds like an interesting concept. What would it be? Something along the lines of a yacht cum sampan?
A portmanteau, as all my readers will know (all five of you), is a large travelling bag of the sort used in 19th century novels. It was large enough to contain compartments, and thus, because it carried a variety of things, the word has come to mean the putting together of disparate objects, or even more particularly, the slotting together of two other words to make a third.
Here’s a definition of its origins from the Online Etymology Dictionary
"Travelling case or bag for clothes and other necessaries," from M.Fr. portemanteau "travelling bag," originally "court official who carried a prince's mantle" (1547), from porte, imperative of porter "to carry" + manteau "cloak." Portmanteau word, a "word blending the sound of two different words," comes from around 1882, and was coined by Lewis Carroll for the sort of words he invented for "Jabberwocky," on notion of "two meanings packed up into one word."
I’m can't quite figure what two words Jabberwocky comes from. Jabber, yes, but Wocky?
Anyway, the other major ‘key word’ was Sanchona. Now to many of you (perhaps four of the five), this is not a word with which you will be familiar. But I know it very well. Sanchona is the pseudonym of a friend of mine in Australia who has written a saga on the early days of Australian commercial history. We first ‘met’ when we were both members of an online writing group. I used to read her book chapter by chapter and comment on it. She would invariably reject my comments, but ce la vie! The book that I read hasn’t been published yet, as it was the second part of her series. But her first book is available, and is called A Family of Strangers, and I have a paperback copy. I hope it’s selling well after all the hard work she put into it, chasing agents around the world and revising and revising - and revising!

By the way, having recovered so wonderfully from my bug of Saturday, I got up to go to work this morning. By 7.15 am I was not feeling good again. And in the end I rang work and told them I wouldn't be there. Went back to bed and slept most of the morning, dreaming about finding myself at work in my pyjama trousers, amongst other things. My daughter tells me that the bug, which she has had personal experience of, does this: makes you feel great one day and lousy the next. For up to a week. Great.