It's checking out HitTail time again!

It's worth going back to HitTail on a regular basis to see whether the things people search for and find on your blog vary much over time. I haven't looked for a while, but anyone who's read this blog consistently over the last year or two (the multitudes who have...) will probably find that this latest list isn't much different to previous ones. People plainly keep on looking for the same things, which is a bit unnerving for anyone wanting to be original. Not only does athletes hand (sans apostrophe) have twice as many hits as the next item, but athletes fingers and athlete hand also both get in the top ten (as nine and ten, respectively). [The hand in the picture is a genuine athlete's hand. So I'm told.] 

My own name, Mike Crowl, is second, the great divorce notes and Brent Stavig come next; James Berardinelli, the film critic, is still going strong in 5th place, followed by our mysterious old friend, Nintendo jewellery (with jewellery spelt the correct way, you'll notice). Karl Maugham, the artist, with everyone spelling his name incorrectly - as I did for years - comes next. (It's Maughan.) And eighth, we have our old favourite, shrinking shirts. 

It seems that the last time I checked this was late last year: as I say, things haven't altered much. Here's the latest list compared to the previous one: 

athletes hand...........................athletes hand 

Mike Crowl.............................Mike Crowl 

the great divorce notes...........James Berardinelli 

Brent Stavig............................Brent Stavig 

James Berardinelli.................the Great Divorce notes 

Nintendo jewellery.................shrinking shirts 

Karl Maugham......................Nintendo jewellery 

shrinking shirts......................Karl Maugham 

athletes fingers.......................athletes fingers 

athlete hand...........................Chrissy Popadacs 

James has slipped a couple of notches, Brent has maintained his place. Karl has snuck up a place, and shrinking shirts have dropped two places. C S Lewis' book has risen, and so has Nintendo Jewellery. Interestingly, Chrissy Popadics has slipped off the radar completely - but she's still in 13th place on the top 100. 

You may not be excited with what people look for on the favourite search engine directory, but I'm always intrigued. As I've no doubt mentioned before: if I wrote about nothing but these ten topics (or the variations within them) I'd probably get people checking out my site galore. But do I want to? I should no doubt be inventive, and find ways in which to drop one of these names/phrases into each post. I'm not sure that it would help me climb to the top of the Google tree, but it would be an interesting exercise. Perhaps I should give it a try over the next ten posts, just for the fun of it (and add Chrissy Popadics - pictured at left being squashed by her then future husband - in for good measure!)

Updating the HitTail Top Ten

18 more posts to go before I hit the big 1000. The aim, as I said in an earlier post, is to do this before the end of 2008. I guess I could write a lot of idiotic, meaningless posts - one-liner posts, even - but I'm going to play fair and aim to keep up the extraordinarily high quality of my posts. (Did I hear someone say, Phooey?)
Anyway, it's a while since I checked out HitTail. For various reasons it's gone on the backburner in the last month, along with a few other things. (Partly because I've been more busy musically than I have through most of the year, and partly because of the prostate stuff which I've discussed in several posts on Workreport.net.)
I thought I'd see if there's been any change in the top ten search items that pick up on my site. And nope! They're pretty much the same as they've been in a long while. Here they are again:
1. Athlete's hand - the all time favourite; currently running at over 152 searches, but if we count all the variations on the theme, there'll be far more than that.
2. Mike Crowl. Well, there's a turn up for the books.
3. James Berardinelli. This film critic has been amongst the top for some time. Don't ask me why: I don't talk about him that much.
4. Brent Stavig. Another top name on the list. Extraordinary.
5. The Great Divorce notes. I have never listed any notes about C S Lewis' The Great Divorce. It's only the combination of having mentioned the book and having 'notes' in the title of my blog that brings this one up so regularly. Other books get the same treatment, but obviously not as often.
6. Shrinking shirts. Another one of those items that got mentioned in a post once and have kept this blog in the public eye ever since.
7. Nintendo jewellery. I sometimes suspect that I'm the only blogger to have ever mentioned Nintendo jewellery. I still have no idea what it is.
8. Karl Maugham. Due to my inability to spell Mr Maughan's name correctly, anyone else who spells it incorrectly finds my site.
9. Athlete's fingers. One of the other variations on number one in the list.
10. Chrissy Popadics. I mentioned Chrissy once many moons again - maybe mentioned her again briefly in a later post, and ever since then she's turned up trumps. Wierd.

Comparing this list with the previous one I did in August, there's only one change: The Great Divorce Notes don't appear there. Instead, my name comes up twice, the second time as Michael Crowl. Scary.

A matter of probabilities

If shrinking shirts is one of the most commonly-searched key phrases on this site – don’t ask me why – then drug rehab must be one of the least. I’ve just checked out HitTail, looking for a trace of this phrase, and there’s not one to be found. ‘Charity shop bolivia nc’, yes; ‘celia cromer wedding’, yes; ‘bugs flies compost pile’, yes; ‘all sort of home kitchen crowl insect’ – surely that must be ‘crawl’ – yes.

But nothing about drug rehab. Yet drugs and drug rehab is something I’ve written about a number of times, for various reasons.

The infinite puzzles of the Internet, eh? Who can fathom the mind of the Google Spider, or deduce her ways?

Plainly then, there’s more real concern about shrinking shirts in this world than about drug rehabilitation. Maybe it’s just that more people wear shirts than take drugs? I guess in terms of probabilities, that would be the case. Or maybe HitTail has a problem with drugs?

The other rather curious thing about key word phrases and my blog is that Henry Lewis Gates is fairly high on the list. Off the top of my head I couldn't recall who he was; nor did I remember writing about him. I had to go back through the blog itself to check him out and find he’s mentioned rather ironically as having misquoted Burns by saying it was Shakespeare who talked about his love being like a red, red rose.

He's rather more important than that -which might account for so many people looking for him.

Shrinking Shirts

It never ceases to amaze me (though it's not hard to amaze me at the best of times) that there are so many searches on the Net for Shrinking Shirts. It's a phrase that comes up time and again on my keywords on HitTail, but it also appears daily in a Google alert I have for the topic.

You can even find video clips on You Tube on the subject. Here's a very earnest gent telling you how to stop your shirts from shrinking (and what to do about grime on your collars and cuffs).



One of the more delightful alerts I received in the last couple of days relates to a guy on Yahoo Answers asking about the problem. He asks:

I just bought a few cheap flannel shirts that fit me perfictly, but when i washed one of them it shrunk so much i could not where it anymore. I have wear them more as a light jacket, so they doen't get very dirty. Could i just throw them in the drier and skip the washing machine to semi-clean them? This would not shrink the shirt would it?

I've left his spelling as it was in the post, by the way. Fortunately he gets some very sensible answers - more so than the last person I came across on the Net who was asking something similar.

So what has all this to do with my creative work? Hmm, nothing really. It's just one of those things that interests me. And Artists Should Always Be On the Lookout for Interesting Things.