You Have My Attention

I’ve written before about the comments that get caught in the blog’s spam filter. Nothing’s come close to spurring my imagination like the comment about bath toys.

The latest spammy comment though at least made me do some internet searching to find the source. Here’s the comment:

and 13 years after the Met began accumulating “boxloads” of that evidence but kept it unexamined in trash bags at Scotland Yard.

That’s it, the entire sentence fragment of spam. Okay, spammer, you’ve caught my attention enough to figure out your website is a place I can sell gold and silver for likely pennies on the dollar. But what did your comment mean?

Strange People Out There

Just a quick post. For the past 2 years, WordPress has sent a summary of the blog: how many visits, where IP addresses are, that sort of thing.

Since my trip to London a couple years ago, I get a lot of hits from people searching for the Crown Jewels – the sceptre and St. Edward’s crown, to be precise. This year’s summary revealed another top 5 search term to get to Small Pond.

Seriously? Who searches for kid-appropriate axe pictures? And how does Google Images decide the picture of an axe I included in a post about words is what people want for this search?

Word Fun

While contemplating cleaning out the library, I came across a stack of discolored paper held together with a rusting paper clip. Memory surged. The paper was from a calendar from the time of long long ago. One of those page-a-day things.

At first I thought the pages belonged to a Sniglets calendar. Remember Sniglets? They were a Rich Hall bit on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News.

I’d explain them, but Hall does it better in this grainy clip from the 1980s.

At Least He’s ‘Possive’

From Small Pond’s spam comment holding cell: “I am possive you are doing your horizontical knowledge.”

Which made me think the following:

• We all need to use “horizontical” more often when conversating.
• Is “possive” a good thing or is it more like “possessive,” in which case the commenter could be jealous that I am doing my horizontical knowledge in public or with other people?
• Is this commenter the same guy on a Philly street corner who told me I was going to rot in hell because I’m a fornicator?
• Why do strangers think I’m getting more action than I really am?

Edited to add that WordPress thinks I should add “fornicator” as a tag for the post. Heh.

How’d Small Pond Do in 2011?

Why do I like WordPress.com to host my blog? Once you get past the main draw of it being free (which cannot be underestimated), I like the Freshly Pressed feature; I like the pretty easy-to-use interface; I like the occasional emails from the site that inspire me to write more. Like the one that came at year-end with stat summaries.

You can check out the full report from the link below.

If you do, maybe you can explain to me why so many people were searching for St. Edward’s crown and/or specter last year? I swear, someone landed on my blog at least three times a week looking for that.

Here’s an excerpt from the report:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,600 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report. I suspect the firework animation is tied to hits per day listed so it’s a pretty lame show. Maybe the finale will be good, but I haven’t watched through the entire thing and I certainly don’t expect you to.