Found Objects

Time for another roundup of search terms.

(apropos of nothing, I seem to have about 30 regular readers)

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Someone obviously had a glut of strawberries, because they searched for “how to make strawberry jam with geleisuiker” twice in rapid succession, and then an hour and a half later for “geleisuiker strawberry jam”, finding how I did it. Probably useful enough; it says that I followed the instructions and it worked. Speaking of strawberries, someone (another someone, in the US) found my strawberry cakes, and I hope they made some and enjoyed them because mine, at least, were delicious.

Winner of the “spectacular failures” category: “sarabal cats” (which found the first installment of the roleplaying writeup, mentioning people travelling from Sarabal and, in quite another context, Athal wondering whether tigers are cats). I don’t know what they actually wanted; the only other things this search finds are the Complete List of Selected Pilgrims for Haj 2007 in Respect of District Srinagar, and two pages of the same German drinks site which lists something called Sarabal and something called Pink Pussy Cat. Neither of which I want to drink, but then I’ve never been a fan of mixed drinks.

Runner-up in this category: “penis deksel” which finds all of 2007, with posts about spam and bad industrial design. Strange coincidence —or even what the searcher was really in search of: ‘lid’ is a Dutch word for ‘penis’, as well as the English word for the Dutch ‘deksel’. [ETA: I suddenly realise what this person wanted: to solve a crossword clue. ‘Lid’ is also an obsolete Dutch word for, well, a lid. It usually means ‘member’ in every sense of the word.] The search also finds this dictionary site, remarkable for wrongness: it seems to first translate ‘deksel’ to ‘lid’ and then take ‘lid’ as the Dutch word to translate into English. (Playing around with that dictionary is instructive. It does get ‘dragon’ right, both ways.)

More of “Valdyas is (not) the real world”: “erday clothes”— Erday’s turns out to be a high-class tailor in Geneva— not, as I first thought, Geneva in Switzerland, but Geneva, Illinois. It’s gratifying that the person who apparently wanted to buy an Erday suit got so interested that he (I suppose) clicked through to the story about the destruction of the other Erday.

I’m sorry to have to disappoint whoever wanted “taverna haarlem”; what they found was my report that it doesn’t exist any more. And both “modern use of headscarves in orthodoxy” and “why don’t all orthodox christian men wear beards” found only my beards and headscarves count, though when looking those up I found lots of things that interested me enough to read.

But at least I didn’t disappoint the people looking for “howl’s moving castle cover” or “howl’s moving castle dutch subs” (I have links!) but probably I did disappoint the one looking for “howl’s moving castle fan fiction”. Also, I’m likely to have disappointed the people who wanted “objects in a castle”, “found object party” and “good picture of alba longa.”

I think that whoever wanted “gilles lescure” wasn’t looking for this particular Gilles Lescure seeing that the search came from Canada. (Also “carien nude”, from South Africa, which wasn’t intended to find the other nude of me painted by someone called Carien). And “karel jan kamphuisen” may not have been intended to find the names deconstruction of Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, which has ‘Karel’, ‘Jan’ and ‘Kamphuisen’ separately.

I do hope the people searching for “roggenmischbrot” and “mischbrot recipe” enjoyed my accounts of baking it, though it doesn’t actually say how to bake it. But “german lemon kulich”, well, no.

In the light of all this it’s almost a letdown that the person searching for “moyri valdyas” actually wanted Moyri in Valdyas; it was the player of Raisse.

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The church page is getting quite the same range as last time around, though fewer people are searching for the date of Easter (figures, with Easter nowhere in sight). I particularly like “waarom is pasen in 2009 op een andere datum” (why is Easter in 2009 on a different date) as if it isn’t on a different date every year; unless they want to know whether Eastern and Western Easter is on a different date in 2009 seeing that it’s the same full moon; well, that’s because otherwise it would fall before Passover. But that searcher is probably not reading this.

I don’t know why practically everybody who searched for the Gospel of one particular day wanted the 6th of July. One person even specified that it was a Sunday. And if they were Protestant or Catholic, they may have been confused and/or disappointed.

The woman who keeps the Dutch site of our exarchate complains occasionally that our parish gets more hits than the exarchate does. I can’t do much about that except provide less information, which I don’t want to do. Admittedly I like it when people search for “de heilige algemeen christelijke kerk” (though all they found was our links page, which is called “Orthodoxe en algemeen christelijke links”) or “12 rue daru, 75008 parijs” (the address of Archbishop Gabriel’s church) or even “exarchaat van Nederland”, and find something useful.

Of course, SS. Peter and Paul themselves are ever popular. But I’m practically sure that the person who found SS. Peter and Paul by searching for “nederlands russish algemeen”, typo and all, didn’t find what they wanted. There’s very little actually to do with anything Russian on that site.