COLUMN: Blog Stats

It's been my long-standing cynical belief that nearly everyone on the planet -- barring, of course, me -- is a total nutbag. Finally I have proof.

If you may have noticed in the dealy at the bottom of each week's column (I believe the proper journalistic term is "dealymajig,") I maintain an online blog in association with the column. It's nothing fancy, just a repository archive for my writing, plus a handy outlet if anything amusing happens during the week.

Well, when I first started the blog up, I hooked it up to a stat tracker program. The tracker lets me know how many visitors I receive in a given time frame, what columns get the most reads, etc., etc. Mostly I forget it's even there and only remember to check it a couple of times a year. Well, the other night I was goofing around with it and realized that it also records some other pretty interesting stuff.

No, it doesn't give me anything useful like your credit card or social security numbers, so sadly I still can't steal your identities and start life anew on some tropical island with a staff of woman-servants. But it does show some unexpected details, such as what country you're from, what kind of computer you're using, your web browser of choice, etc., etc. Oh, and one other VERY interesting thing: keyword searches.

Let's say you're doing a Web search using a popular search engine like Yahoo or Google. If you search for a particular phrase that somehow pulls up MY blog as a result, my tracker lets me know what you searched for -- and what I found is proof positive that humanity is a very scary beast. Let me show you:

These are actual keyword phrases that folks have searched for online over the past 12 months, leading them to my blog:

• "MY KID IS HYPERTENSE" - When you type this exact phrase into Google, as 117 people this year have, my blog is the #1 link. Why? No clue. I must've used the words "my," "kid," and "hypertense" in close promixity to one another in a column sometime in the past 3 years. Just for the record, I don't know what to do if your kid is hypertense.

• "CHUBBY TONGUE" - Again, no clue why this phrase would pull up my blog. But even less clue why anyone would be searching for this in the first place.

• "OFFENSIVE JANITORS" - What? There's no OffensiveJanitors.com?

• "CHIPS AHOY USING RUBBER IN THEIR COOKIES" - Funny, but mildly frightening, as I'm a solid fan of Chips Ahoy. Am I ingesting rubber? Do we need to get our news dept. on top of this?

• "DARRELL WALTRIP THREE LEGGED DOG" - Boogity boogity boogity!

• "FAKE PEE PANTS" - Is this a real product? Is there a marketing guy out there somewhere going, "C'mon, it's hysterical, you can fake all your friends into thinking that you have bladder control issues! That's AWESOME. Why is no one buying a pair?"

• "PARANORMAL EXPERIENCE WITH HUMMING ECTOPLASM" - Impressively specific.

• "BAD STUFF ABOUT JAPAN" - Because, let's face it, all we hear about Japan is Hondas and Playstations and Jackie Chan. At least one person out there's concerned about the seedy underbelly of "bad stuff" occurring in the Land of the Rising Sun.

• "KATIE HOLMES NUDE" - Hey, if I had THAT, I'd have better things to do than write this column.

• "KIDNEY STONES THAT LOOK LIKE PINK CANDY" - If I emitted kidney stones that looked like pink candy, my first stop would NOT be the internet. It would be the emergency room.

• "NAKED GRANDMAS" - Great. About a year ago, I wrote a column about one of the most embarassing moments of my life: accidentally walking into the sight of my 100-year-old grandmother in mid-wardrobe change. As a result, I appear to now be disappointing scores of perverts. Oh, and speaking of perverts:

• "SEXUAL ORIENTATION OF QC WEATHERMEN" - You know, I watch a lotta TV. I've seen my fair share of weather forecasts. And not ONCE have I stopped and wondered what any of those folk do after dark. I only wonder if I'm gonna need a coat the next day. Maybe I'm missing out.

Which leaves my favorite:

• "IS MITCHUM DEODORANT MORE STICKY NOW" - Can't you just picture the guy who searched for this? Getting out of the shower, rolling on his trusty Mitchum when suddenly the painful reality sets in - "What the...," he says, incensed, "Is it me, or is this deodorant more sticky than I recall? I MUST RESEARCH THIS TROUBLING THEORY IMMEDIATELY!" Folks, if you've got time to investigate the stickiness of your preferred brand of deodorant online, you officially have less of a life than I do -- and that's sayin' something.

I'm starting to realize that I could become an internet sensation and the king of the cyberworld if I just start peppering my columns with popular search words. Of course, that would be pandering and I'm above that. So instead, I'll leave you with this humble nugget of wisdom:

Hot free nude Britney Justin. Truth Kennedy assassination aliens ghosts Star Trek. Free mp3 Harry Potter ending. Playstation X-Box pwned Warcraft Halo 3 cheats. Even more naked grandmas.

Yes, words to live by.