What People Are Looking For

After I put up my first web site -- including some short fiction I wrote -- I used a small program to collect the phrases people entered in search engines like Google to find the site.  The phrases in the image here were collected over months, as random visitors would land on my lonely site like particles from space.

As you can see, there is a world full of curious perverts and criminals out there.  Of course they wouldn't have been sent to my site unless some of the words could be found there, but... whatever.

Note that government spies, with access to the logs of every web server and search engine in the world, could put names to the queries.  But luckily for the curious, the Bush/GOP crew has brought government to such a low level of competence that they need have little to fear as they sit in their underwear drinking beer and asking their non-judgmental computer questions too intimate for human ears.

In the spirit of the queries, the picture is of an anonymous stranger, who nearly knocked me over when I tried to photograph him.  I remember the mother of the kids in the background was screaming bloody murder from the porch after he asked if he could rent the kids for a few hours to help him panhandle.  All they had to do was look miserable while he repeated his spiel: that they were just two of the 17 orphans he and his wife were raising back in the motel, and they needed money for food, shoes and bibles to brighten their days.

I guess I shouldn't record stuff like that here -- it might give ideas to some lowlife typing "make money panhandling" into Google right now.