Seriously. What are you googling out there that leads you to Historiann.com?
- disfigurement of Civil War soldiers
- original barbie
- Pocahontas
- pretty 40 year old women
- hot 40 year old women
- Burger King crowns
- full body-length posters of Cher
- Thomas Cole
- Captain Scarlet
- Burning Man naked girls
- hot women athletes
- (censored)
- cod piece/codpiece
- knitwear
- forties pinup
It’s times like these that I realize that the vast, vast majority of my fellow citizens use the internets very differently than I do, and to very different ends. I don’t like the looks of it, but I have to admit that I’m pretty sure which posts those queries led to (except for the Cher query and codpiece.) They’re not nearly as sick as these babies, which just came in over the transom last night.
- In 1492, was it OK to beat a woman
- was it legal to beat a woman in 1492
Yegads. Is someone plotting domestic violence by time-travel? But, my fave queries are of course, the philosophical,
- what is america
And the political:
- John Adams at his worst
Don’t look for Historiann to be lovin’ up Mr. Second-Worst! Welcome, my fellow Adams haterz! You have found a refuge here.
Historiann 
Wasn’t it my unending search for a full-size Cher poster the way that I found this blog?
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I knew it must have been you! I almost captioned the photo above, “GayProf, this one’s for you.”
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Vintage Cher. I could hug you.
(When I was a single-digit-age young-un’, back in the days of the S & C variety show, “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” was my absolute favorite song. I had no earthly idea what it was about — something about people living on the edges of society was all I could figure — but it was the one song that would always send me running for the hairbrush/microphone.)
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I think we had the same childhood! I remember loving Cher, and thinking Sonny was a total dud. I was terribly envious of Chastity Bono though, that she got to run on stage with her parents to say goodnight…
Cher is mysteriously ageless, although she must be in her 60s, right? (I know it’s probably all plastics now, but still…)
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Wow, you don’t like John Adams? I liked his movie! Can you recommend something I could read with a critical view? Thanks.
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Hi Hysperia–there was a decent popular book called The American Aurora, which is named after a Repubican newspaper that went after Adams. Adams ended up jailing the editor after the Alien & Sedition acts were passed. The book had too many passages that were just reprints from the newspaper, but that’s a book that might give a sense of what an unpopular and polarizing figure Adams was. I’m not up enough on the scholarly literature on Adams to help anyone navigate it–but the McCullough biography of Adams was overly flattering, to say the least. (But then, popular biographers aren’t in the business of telling the book-buying public, “oh yeah–that guy? Mr. Founding Father? What a total bastard!”)
Adams gets too much credit for being the John Adams of 1775-76, and not enough blame for being the John Adams of the 1780s-90s, IMHO. He became a total reactionary once he figured out that he and other elites wouldn’t necessarily control the whole U.S. after the Revolution.
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Hi Historiann! Funny how the web works: a handful of surfers/googlers have found the Romantoes blog by asking questions like “What do Tralfamadorians eat?” You couldn’t make it up.
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Tom–I’m dying to know: what’s the answer? (Actually, what’s a Tralfamadorian? Is that something from the Lord of the Dorks?)
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How do I find out what people “Googled” to get to my brilliant blog?
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It’s in the wordpress software…and you’re not on wordpress, so, sorry!
(And I have no clue how to do it if my software doesn’t do it for me…) If you figure it out, my guess is that there are some sickos who have googled “dogs peeing” and have found you that way.
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Thanks, Historiann! I just got off the phone with my IT people. They told me how to do a keyword search term analysis for the blog. The three most popular terms are: “dogs don’t pee there,” “how often dogs pee,” and “peeing dog graphic.”
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Yikes! Coulda been some of my students from last spring, I suppose! Any progress on tracking down that trope, Ortho, the peeing dogs one I mean? I don’t see any of my students in those links to Historiann.com, though, ‘cept who knows about that Burning Man thing?!? Maybe the Adams as well. No Federalists in my classes, that I can see, anyway!
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OK. Here’s how this works. If someone clicks from a Google/Yahoo!/Cuil/MSN/etc search engine results page (SERP) to a historiann page, then the relevant [sic] search term(s) are captured and show up in your wordpress dashboard.
Since most people (generally) trust Google et al, they directly click on SERP links without vetting the site as a whole — assuming that they will get relevant info. (I would assume that they quickly realize that they’re in the wrong neighborhood.)
So, it’s really the search engine and their less-than-perfect algorithms that are to blame here. (Though the humans typing in those terms are another story altogether; they might want to look into the Pete Townshend/Gary Glitter defense.)
While this stuff can be fun/scary/amusing, it would be significantly more troubling if you actually had a HIGH ranking for a term like “Burning Man naked girls.” (Time to sell my Google shares!)
best,
your webmaster
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Hey, thanks Webmaster. We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!
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The Tralfamadorians are a fictional alien race mentioned in several novels by Kurt Vonnegut. Tralfamadore is the fictional home planet of aliens from several novels by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Details on the inhabitants of the planet vary from novel to novel. from wikipedia
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Oh–thanks, John! I used to read Vonnegut, but I didn’t remember that term–it sounds more familiar now that you explain the connection. (And now I also understand why Tom might know something about Tralfamadorians.)
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Indyanna, I have not pursued the pissing dogs trope further. I thought about exploring the trope by responding to The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies representing animals CFP, but then I decided to continue working on the dissertation instead.
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Sounds like a good call, Ortho. The diss. has to come first. (NB: On the subject of this thread, I wonder if Historiann will get an even weirder selection of daytrippers–the electronic “bridge-and-tunnel” crowd– when people start downloading this “Chrome” thing that Google is bringing out? I don’t know, since I don’t know the difference between browse and search… )
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