So, friends might perhaps be amused to know what some of the highest-volume links to my site are.

One of the top hits on my site is Snails do it, to…, which features a frame from a scene in the excellent documentary, Microcosmos, which features two snails copulating. 🙂 It apparently comes up on Google searches (especially image searches) on phrases like “snails”, “sex animation”, “sex movies”, “how to do sex” (I am not kidding!). I’ve even had a couple hits come in from searches on just “sex”.

Another popular destination is my setting of Mark Twain’s Cannibalism in the Cars, for which I’m right up around the top results in Google (I was the second link, when I just checked). I’m not sure if these people are largely Mark Twain fans, or it’s a popular school assignment, or what.

By far my most popular page from web searches, though (web searches as a whole make a fairly small portion of my traffic: most of my incoming traffic comes from non-search sites that link directly to me) is my post on the Best Pacman Strategy Guide. Which is a short paragraph that comes up #2 in Google searches for “pacman strategy”, and essentially links to Google’s #1 hit for that search. Go figure.

One page that used to get quite a few hits, but doesn’t any longer because I’ve added it to my robots file, which tells web spiders not to index the page for web searches, is this one. It’s a link to a harrowing tale of parents accused of child pornography over some very innocent family photos, taken during a camping trip. The brief paragraph describing the link apparently contained just the right words for my site to come up in web searches such as “naked children photos”… I’d just as soon my site not be found by such queries. Hell, maybe most of them come from diligent FBI workers and the like trying to sniff out the bad stuff, I don’t know. And I don’t care. I’m more than happy to lose that traffic…

(Originally, I wrote the above paragraph in such a way as to try to avoid invoking the same problem terms, so I wouldn’t end up with the same problem for this post, as I did the camping photos one. It then dawned on me, however, that talking about “snail sex” in the first paragraph and “children” in the last, pretty much guaranteed that problem anyway, so I’m resigned to just preemptively adding this post to my robots file before there’s a problem.)

From Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe:

[A] District Attorney in Texas is on trial for building himself a sweet rig on the county dime. This machine in question sports “two hard drives, seven fans, high-end video and audio cards, a wireless Internet connection and cables that glow under ultraviolet light.” It’s a crime, yeah, but it’s an awesome crime. I make an exception for awesome crimes.

Looks like spambots are starting to exploit a flaw in my aging version of WordPress to post links in my sidebar; guess it’s time to upgrade soon.

This being Dr Seuss’s birthday, in addition to my daughter Joy’s, someone felt inspired to write an atheist’s tributory piece. Following is an excerpt.

In a place known as Whoville the folks got distraught
When Horton the elephant said what he thought.
“The oddest of oddities isn’t as odd
As people believing that there is a god.”

The Who Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists
The Who Vegetarians, Wiccans, and Nudists,
The Who Presbyterians, Baptists, New Agers:
All spread the sad news on their cell phones and pagers.

A Who Evangelical fell to his knees
And he said, “Oh no, Horton! I beg of you, please!
We always have liked you. We all think you’re swell,
And we can’t stand the thought that you’re headed to hell!”

A couple years ago, researchers were puzzled to find that people who are overweight are less likely to die than people who are either skinny, obese, or at a normal weight.

After further research, we now know why. While, as we’ve known for quite a long time, people who are at above-normal weight are at increased risks for deaths from diabetes, cancer or heart disease, these risks are not increased sufficiently to compensate for the significantly reduced risk of death from diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, infections, and lung disease!

So, in your face, skinny people! 😀

…Oh, except… at ~270 lbs on a 5’11” frame, my Body Mass Index of 38 would classify me as obese, not overweight. 😕 Ah, well, at least if I start dieting and getting regular exercise, I don’t have quite as far to shoot for any more! 🙂

A short but fascinating video discussing how we know that one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome resulted from the fusion of what had previously been, and still remains so in other modern primates, two pairs of chromosomes, and how this provides evidence for a common ancestry between humans and other primates.

Rock on, Granny!