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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
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(First up, a bit of news from the B&C front:
First Date with Nate: A Day Late, Not Great: "So much for making a 'big splash' in your debut performance. This display of 'hitting' looked more like a post-nasal drip."
Now let's move forward to this week's look back. Onward and backward!)
" I can only conclude that there are some real perverted pieces of personry out there -- and that I've written some pretty oddball combinations of words that probably shouldn't be considered legal in the English language. Or this state. Or possibly humanity as a whole."
One of the many kicks I get from blogging -- most of them to the groin, as it turns out -- is browsing through the logs to see what searches are bringing people to the site. Every so often, I'll highlight some of the more disturbing query fare with a post in the Googlicious! category. Whether those searches reflect more scarily on the mommy's-basement weirdos making the searches, or the unbalanced, twitchy blogger who wrote the pieces that led Google to send them this way, I can't really say. I can only conclude that there are some real perverted pieces of personry out there -- and that I've written some pretty oddball combinations of words that probably shouldn't be considered legal in the English language. Or this state. Or possibly humanity as a whole.
Sometimes, though, the searches leading here are more innocent, if no less scary. Unlike the vast majority of searchers, these are folks not actually looking for comedy websites, nor for 'kinky grandma wrestling', nor for 'shaved ostrich porn clips'. Instead, they're genuinely looking for information -- trying, in possibly misguided ways, to better their own lives. And using the web to do it. So that's a couple of strikes against them for starters, even before they wind up here.
Take, for instance, an early post of mine entitled, 'So, How Many Weight Watchers Points Would 'M&Ms Chili' Be?.
(Yeah, I know. Back in the day, the titles were nearly as long-winded as the posts. Shaddup, you.)
In this entry, I mentioned that I've been trying to eat 'healthier', and poked a little fun at the series of 'I lowered my cholesterol!' TV ads that were airing back then, before many of you were actually born. The actual content of the post isn't so relevant, in this case. Embarrassing, perhaps. Riddled with parenthetical asides, naturally. But relevant -- not so much.
By one metric, though, that post is one of the most 'popular' on the site. It's because of the juxtaposition of those two elements in the title: 'Weight Watchers points' and 'M&Ms'. A fair percentage of people visiting this site do so because they've seen fit -- and I use the term 'fit' loosely -- to enter those two terms into Google. And Google sends them to me.
No. I'm not making this up. A lot of people really seem to want to know the WW score for M&Ms. Sometimes, they'll be more specific, asking about 'peanut butter M&Ms', or 'M&M minis', or 'a party-sized bag of M&M candies'.
I've never been in Weight Watchers, myself. But I can't imagine these people are doing it right.
I've also wondered how many of these questions come after the fact. A lot of people overeat on impulse, or in response to stress. I find it hard to believe that many of them are taking the time to fire up their modems in the middle of a chocolate-fueled candy lust to ask how many points they'll incur if they go through with that plan to snarf a whole bag of treats. My guess is they're mostly sitting there afterward, with heaving breaths and sticky brown fingers, hoping they've still got enough points left to eat something besides rice cakes and celery stalks for the rest of the month.
Dubious as they are, though, these searches are pretty common, so I've gotten used to them. Ditto most of the other WW queries -- I mention a lot of other (really, terribly unhealthy) foods in that post, so Google will sometimes send people looking for 'Weight Watchers points' and 'chili' or 'milkshakes' or 'Snickers' or hot fudge' my way. Not that I'm of any help to them, or that they read any further than a sentence or two, I'm sure. But the stream of seekers is steady and unwavering, and over time, I've come to expect just about all of them.
Until yesterday. In the afternoon, I was looking through the logs and found a new one to me. Someone out there had popped onto the site by Googling:
'Weight Watchers points for a 72-year-old man'
Yow. And I thought a bag of M&Ms was binging. Somebody out there has seriously got the munchies, and I'm afraid his surname may be 'Lechter'.
Still, it's probably healthier than that M&Ms chili I was on about. Plenty of lean meat on those septuagenarians, if you know where to look. I just hope the person has a side salad instead of the French fries -- it pays to cut back on calories whenever you can. Just ask Weight Watchers.
Hey, that presents a great idea, doesn't it? Write a blog incorporating some weird stuff (more so than we usually do, even) just to see what kind of things the filthy underbelly are Googling. A post entitled: Mother Leather Baby Oil Monkeys, perhaps? Tom Cruise Fantasy Grapefruit Plunger? The possibilities are endless.
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How about WW and cheesecake...not beefcake, cheesecake...that is how I found you...
OK, I lie sometimes...WW offends my sense of, well, everything. If I like it, I will probably eat it, if it is edible, that is...or suppose to be eaten.