Friday, July 22, 2005

Search story

Several months ago I came across a hilarious search story on the blog Frogs and Ravens. She took some of the Google search terms that brought people to her site, and made a story of them.

At the time my blog was still new, and I only had a few searches per day. Then I seemed to achieve a critical mass (other than in my diet) and the search engines found me. Lately I remembered the search story meme and decided to try it myself.

I used all the searches, not just Google's, and I did them in the order that they appeared. This group of search strings is slightly different than usual, because it doesn't include searches for chicken and couscous salad, Leunig prayers, or turtle egg pictures, which I think are my top three search terms at present. But I writes 'em like I sees 'em, and just took the first 30 or so. So here you go. The search terms are bolded.

I needed a crash course in identifying caterpillars. While dining al fresco, I'd accidentally swallowed one that dropped into my zuchinni soup! I'd been worried and inattentive all day. With the chickens broody and denuding the trees of cedar berries, I couldn't stop agonizing: why do roosters pick on my hens?

That caterpillar must have been hallucinogenic. I imagined I could converse with weird looking turtles. They had good names no one else would think of, like Kitkitdizze! Their chief told me that they were all devoted arachnophiles. But their main job was to destroy all toads. Sevin was their preferred poison. After we spoke, they all crawled together into a chicken nest box, and enjoyed a catawba moth spread with witch butter that some Mergansers had sold them.

I set off on foot for the house of Jenny Zelle, who had a job sexing young chickens at the local hatchery. She liked my crazy chicken pictures, and knew a lot about herbal medicine.

Although it was broad daylight, a chorus of owls sounded from the trees. "At night they hunt catawba tree worms, Virginia" I whispered to my shadow.

Was I still hallucinating?

"A sapsucker! A chicken roosting in nest golf balls!" I exclaimed, when I reached the end of the country lane.

"You're not making sense," Jenny recoiled.

I sat down hard on her steps. "I need help identifying fuzzy caterpillars," I moaned.

I watched a Muscovy duck snatch a Japanese beetle from the Cataba in her yard, as I struggled to regain proper use of my tongue.

Jenny gasped. "Yellow fuzzy caterpillar?" she queried. "Near the chicken nesting boxes?"

I nodded vigorously. Jenny looked worried, but prescribed a strong dose of alcohol. "It's the worst caterpillar in Alabama. Buy Jack Daniels!"


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It's Friday! Don't forget to view the Friday Ark. And there is a new "I and the Bird" over at Charlie's Bird Blog this week too.

12 comments:

  1. Nicely done. I almost thought i had eaten a hallucinogenic caterpillar myself, followin that lot!

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  2. Anonymous10:00 AM

    Some day I'll gather enuf nerve to ask you how you can research queries to your blog so I can do the same on mine.

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  3. Thanks Pete!

    Pablo, I use SiteMeter. Just the free version. It's funny to see some of the searches - you wonder what in the world people are looking for.

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  4. Good for you! So many of my searches are for a pedophile serial killer so I don't think my story would be very good.

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  5. That was fun. Definitely the highest and best use of stat counters, which are otherwise fairly useless because they don't tell you how many people are accessing the site via feed readers, which would include a large percentage of your most faithful lurkers.

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  6. I don't know Karen, you should try it! Maybe you could do a crime drama LOL.

    Thanks Dave. I love looking at the stats because of the funny searches. I just saw one for "Turtle psychologist". It's no "Iodized salt psychic" but it's still pretty funny. :)

    And half the time the searches are actually finding things in the comments rather than what I've written, which adds another dimension I think.

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  7. You just found me a new writing game. Thanks!

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  8. Cute!

    By the way, I see that some of your photos have disappeared... I am having the same problem... any idea what the cause is?

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  9. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  10. MM I thought you might like that. :)

    Rho can you see them now? I can see them all (yours too)... maybe it was just a glitch?

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  11. I was tired. It had been a long, good read. I sank back into my gravity zero chair...

    I get that one a lot.

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  12. Hmm I wonder if there really is a gravity zero chair, and I'm just missing out on it...? :)

    I'm picturing Rigel from the TV show "Farscape", if you've ever seen that.

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