Bored on the Fourth of July

Or, That Was Zen, This is Tao.

Actually, I'm not really bored. I've spent the day at home doing all those tedious computer housekeeping tasks that our grandparents never used to have to do. You know, updating web pages, backing up email, responding to messages that have been lying in the inbox for six months, deleting old versions of files, wondering why there is only 20Gb left on a 120Gb drive that was new last month (actually, I'm still working on that last one).

But you don't care about that, you care about lolly stick jokes. A reader, AJ, has sent one in. First, let me remind you that you're not actually supposed to read this blog. I'm not writing this for your benefit, I'm writing it for mine. Therefore, there is no "implied audience", and the fact that there is nevertheless an audience is messing things up considerably. Anyway, AJ notes that she once saw a joke on a gum wrapper:

Q. Which salmon don't swim upstream?
A. The dead ones.

There's a certain delightfulness in the harsh brutality of that one; not as charming as the hydrogometer joke on the recently anonymized DB's website.

OK, onto the other housekeeping stuff: the signs arrived yesterday. You're not supposed to know what the signs are, by the way, although you can probably guess. Maybe I'll put a webpage up about them on one or other of my sites, assuming that the whole things works out without injury or arrest.

AJ also suggests some anagrams of "Strom Thurmond". The point was not really to find anagrams of Strom Thurmond, but more to point out that it doesn't look like a name, but more like an anagram of something else. I blame Chris Morris, who once made a point of introducing all Nine Inch Nails records as featuring "The well-known anagram, Trent Reznor".

My favourite (made by me with the help of a computer and William Tunstell-Pedoe's excellent Anagram Genius software) is that Vladimir Nabokov = Vivid Amoral Bonk. It was subsequently pointed out to me by Google that Vladimir Nabokov is also an anagram of Vivian Darkbloom, who is a character in one of his novels (smartarse). Of course, search for Vivian Darkbloom on the net, and instead you get a load of Xena the Warrior Princess Slash Fiction by someone who has adopted Darkbloom as a pseudonym.

Oh dear. I've just been reminded of fan fiction, and for reasons which made sense at the time, I just tried googling for "Mel and Sue" "fan fiction". About the only hit I found was CreepyLesbo, who I'm sure was recently linked to by DB. It's a painfully tiny internet, kids, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. CreepyLesbo, if you look at your referrer logs and wonder where the bizarre search queries are coming from, it's probably just me.

Which reminds me, I should make a competition: the competition is for who can make the weirdest google search query that brings them to my site. To win, you'll have to get the search terms into my logs, and then email me to claim that it was you. Cheating will be made difficult, since the servustats.com thing operates via JavaScript to get the http-referrer, so you can't just use wget with some made up search string (unfortunately). The same process makes winning without cheating equally difficult since servustats seems remarkably moody, and refuses to record most legitimate accesses, something to do with IP addresses and the like, I'll warrant. If you do manage to cheat, then you can still win, since I figure that the difficulty of cheating means that it's more effort than trying to win legitimately.

The prize, should anyone bother to take part, is my complete collection of used lolly sticks. I'm currently storing these on my keyboard, in the valley between the number keys and the function keys. It's just the right size to store lolly sticks, so I wonder if this is a design feature. Also, does anyone know the name for the gap between the number keys and the function keys on a keyboard? It's the kind of thing that ought to have a technical name. Otherwise, I shall christen it the "uvula", which completely fails on the grounds of analogy, but is in honour of a far side cartoon.

Crap, people have been getting their uvula's pierced. That's something I could have lived without knowing.

Boring stuff: I'll be in England for most of the rest of July. So, er, there.