Hitting the Links

I have this cool new counter called the CQ Counter on the blog. You can find it by clicking that little CQ Counter button thinger at the bottom of the sidebar.

It's way nicer than my old counter, which didn't do anything but roughly tabulate the web traffic to my site. This new one gives me all kinds of useless statistics about all the people who check out the blog, including what Operating System they use, their IP Address, even their choice of web browser.

But my favorite item to check out on the CQ Counter is the link information. You see, I can see the last 20 or so visitors that I've had, and what website linked them over to Crushed by Inertia. So, if someone did a Google search for something interesting, and that led them to a page on my blog, I'll see those Google results. Or if my blog is on another blog's "links" page, I'll just see that blog's name.

It's pretty cool. First of all, it lets me know that, by far, more people link to me from this page than any other. Interesting thing about that? It's a Mexican music blog. Written entirely in Spanish. Yet somehow, they have found and linked to my page. I mean, I get traffic from these guys every single day. They clearly have a much larger following than I do. It's really cool, and my only wish is that I could read and understand their blog.

I mean, maybe they're goofing on me over there and I just can't tell because, despite 8 years of Spanish-language education, I can't really speak Spanish. Oh, I can get by. If they were saying "Crushed by Inerta esta muy tonto," I'd get their meaning. But they're using big words I don't understand. And probably the past participle and the future imperfect. Here's a sample:

De ahí, trás una de las llamada estratégicas de Tony, conectamos pari por la salida a Aldama. ¿ la encontramos? Ni de puta madre. Después de meternos en dos calles ( es un decir, eran mas bien cicatrices marcadas por las incesantes trocas que no han de parar de pasar por esos terrenos áridos) cerradas, Toni volvió a hablar y le dijeron que se iban a ir a otra granja de las cercanías. ya más al rumbo de la ciudad. Llegamos a la mentada granja y no había nada.

I might very well agree with that, if I could understand it. I see something about "puta madre," which I think I know because it means "your mother's a whore." But other than that, I got nothing.

Also, big ups to PSoTD, a great political blog that sends me a whole bunch of traffic all the time.

It's also really fun to note what Google searches send people to Crushed by Inertia. Now, bear in mind that any and all articles I publish here on the blog get referenced by Google. Google tends to archive the blog by week, so if you put in a keyword search for two words, the blog will come up eventually providing I have used both of those words within a single week. Which leads, as you can imagine, to my page coming up even when I've never written anything about the subject in question.

For example, some highly questionable person out there did a Yahoo search for the following: "Kidnapping girls using sodium pentathol." And Crushed by Inertia comes up as one of the first responses because, in a single week in March, I wrote the following two sentences in different posts:

"This would be a case of the government coming in and kidnapping a woman because they disagree with the treatment agreed upon by her husband and doctors." (This article was about the Terri Schiavo case)

"You meet people like this once in a while. People who don't have the social grace to realize you would rather peel the flesh off of your bones with a rusty pocketknife than converse with them. People who like to brag incessantly about things they haven't even done yet and probably never will do. People obsessed with telling you more about their lives than Dave Eggers on a Barbra Walters special under the influence of sodium pentathol." (This was an article about an annoying, porn-obsessed customer who comes into the video store).

So, anyway, because of this phenomenon, and just because I write about a variety of topics here on the blog, there are many interesting Google searches out there that lead people to Crushed by Inertia. Here is a random sampling of some that I have found through CQ Counter recently:

"elf inertia"
"petism"
"devil went down"
"art linklater"
"make it to a gas"
"The Great Gonzo"
"pen island" (I'm sorry...that was months ago, and that still makes me laugh...)
"masturbating with icy hot"

Those are all real. There's others, too, but I have forgotten some of the best ones. I should be writing all of these down.