'Bred Crumbs

It is the second anniversary of 'Bred Crumbs' launch, and to celebrate in the now traditional manner:

The Most Intriguing Web Searches That Led to 'Bred Crumbs in 2002

These tend toward the tawdry, but smutty or not, keep in mind as you read each: somebody typed this into a search engine.

12. cute gay bots*

11. matt damon oral sex silent bob

10. Kent McCord naked

9. hippie porn

8. fairly oddparents porn

7. insect sex porn sites

6. mike tyson animal abuser

5. dad can i suck your penis tripod

4. surfing for jesus puppet drama

3. he's quite the masturbator

2. carp rasslin

1. is there any way that i can get into a gay porn site without a credit card and without paying anything?

Also, I would be remiss not to honor the long-reigning 'Bred Crumbs search query king, Galen Tomlinson, a k a Turbo, the American Gladiator who may or may not be gay, as discussed way back in May 2001. The photo links in that entry have long since vanished (here's a new source**), but people trying to find info on Turbo and/or his supposed sexuality wound up here often – 174 times last July alone, and I still get pilgrims daily.

Turbo, if you're out there, gay, and ready to come out to your fans, I'd be more than happy to be your mouthpiece.

More than happy.

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* I assume bot was a typo. Still.

** This is a thorough – perhaps too thorough – American Gladiators site. I love this non sequitur Gladiator trivia: "Tower never competed in Skytrack because he was too big to fit in the harness and he eats red meat every day."

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Somewhere out there, someone with a mail-enabled cell phone and no command of English is trying to place a special order with someone at a particular shoe company whose name, it turns out, is significantly misspelled by its business associates surprisingly often, as my e-mailbox can attest. Because the person overlooked the importance of making sure one has the correct address, one of his misdirected, nearly inpenetrable requests will, instead of getting a response, get posted on this website.

Fwd from

Mr English !

I found how they do the timblands wid the burberry,gucci,and so
On also I would also like you too send the timbs out for me I ask you for ok
My size 10m I would like timbs tan wid the white sole const version. 12 in same kind and
11m field boots black wid the white bottom the leather   I have one to give you that it that's I won't bother you again
I just look for the size
Also please send [a specifically named person] the black timbs you said you would send him thanks I owe you big anythng you need let me know

And a reminder to anyone who might still be confused about the matter: I do not make rugged hiking boots. Or rap.

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Farscape's back, for probably its last run, beginning tomorrow night. Watch it.

Now, the long version:

On the eve of the beginning of Farscape's last stand – the second half of Season 4, after which the SciFi Channel has prematurely canceled the show – the damned network is showing promising signs of squirming. On TVGuide.com, the president of the channel defends its decision last September to renege on its 44-episode renewal halfway through, trying desperately to make the show's audience look smaller than it actually is.

One of the few points the executive makes that isn't fairly easily picked apart is the contention that the channel offered to renew the show for a fifth season for 13 episodes (as opposed to the original 22-ep renewal), which would have given the show a shot at wrapping up its story arcs; if true, and if the money of the offer was reasonable and sufficient to make the show, then bad on the producers. But given that the channel's already gone back on its stated intentions once, it doesn't really have credibility on its side. After all, this is the channel that considers Braveheart and psychic talk shows to be "sci-fi." The damn thing might as well go ahead and just call itself USA2.

Particularly bothersome is the executive's faulting Farscape for telling a story over the course of time – the very thing TV is uniquely suited to do. So don't let not being caught up keep you from watching the last 11 new eps of Farscape, beginning tomorrow at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific weekly; Save Farscape has an up-to-now primer which is good and remarkably concise, though you'll have to overlook some unfinished Web formatting cues.

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I have fallen in love with a woman.

It's not that weird. She's not a real woman.

But I know I'm in love, because every time the train pulls into the Richmond station, the end of the line, I rush off as quickly as I can, even though the train won't be going anywhere and I have plenty of time to catch my bus. I rush off so I can hear her on the platform outside:

"Out-of-Service Train, Platform One," she announces, quickly adding: "Do Not Board."

It's that last bit from the automated, electronic announcement system – simulated female voice on the inbound side of the platform, male on the outbound – that captivates me. First, the forbidding of boarding is somehow expressed with dire emphasis: get on that out-of-service train, you die. (Not as punishment; she is trying to save you from hazard. She would never hurt you.) But also, the warning is dependent upon plosives, the D and the B, sounds pushed out of human mouths with a particular living force that machines haven't fully figured out how to mimic yet. So those three urgent words come out crumpled along the edges.

The effect is magical. It sings in loops in my head all morning.

And maybe it would be magical if the male robot of Platform Two said it, too. Or maybe it's just nostalgia at work, fond memories of my old CompuServe days, when, in emulation but not duplication of AOHell's now-famous male mail announcement, CompuServe added some recorded announcements from a (real) woman. The funny thing was her apparent moodiness. If you had e-mail, she seemed excited for you: "You have new mail waiting!" she perked. But if you went into a forum, and people had responded to messages there since last you visited, she seemed pissed off. "You have new messages waiting," she enounced with clear impatience. Very strange. Was that really her best take on that line?

Platform One would never take that tone with me. Not my sweet speech-impeded robot love.

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The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser gives you a graphical view of how Google links websites to each other. Here's the beginning of the 'Bred Crumbs map (click on it for a bigger view), and that's without fetching even more links from any of the tree's branches. The time-wasting learning possibilities are endless. But be warned: using it means a version of the dreaded Java Virtual Machine on your computer. (Link via Search Engine Watch)

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San Francisco again this week is playing host to Macworld, which always sets Apple's dozens of users worldwide abuzz about what new proprietary products will be pitched by annoying spokespeople. The company is trying to overcome reports that it has already abandoned its goofy desklamp-shaped iMac. But really, since the only things it accomplished anyway were trendy stylishness and the consumption of apparently extremely disposable income, why not acknowledge the planned obsolescence of fashion and move on to the next design? I humbly submit my* proposal, which will be perfect for the dorm-resident market:

It features a large compartment in which you can store iSnacks, which can be easily transferred to your iWave for plug-and-play installation into iYou.

Next proposal: Mac and O'Reilly should have to Jell-O-wrestle to determine the one-and-only user of the "Safari" theme. I presume KidSmart already lost the first round.

(Understand, Jell-O wrestling is my suggested resolution to nearly every problem. Hardly anyone ever takes me up on it.)

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Why I Love the Internet, Part 8743, and Why I Love Post-Its, Part 4:

On the bus, I get to Page 103 of Eggers'** You Shall Know Our Velocity and discover a line is missing. I get to work and hit the Web with a finely tuned entry into the Google Toolbar. I find the missing line (on McSweeney's, of course). I write it on a tiny Post-It and place it at the top of the malformed page. Erratum repaired, instantly.

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* With a lunch-line assist from Jeremy, who suggested the pivotal niche-marketing design tweak: mini-.

** Apparently, somewhere back in the bowels of this 'blog, I misspelled good Dave's last name, with an a for the second e. I'm regularly visited by search queries with the wrong spelling. I could find it and fix it, but then where would the misspellers be? Or should I say, "the mispellers"?

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Speaking (third item) of bad, bad product names: Nad's for Men, a hair-removal gel. The label has other words around and between Nad's and Men, but you see the key words first. (Plus they have a crapFlashular website, which my link above works around.)

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