Watching Out For The 'Low Men...'

I spent a little time yesterday exploring my blog stats in Blogger’s handy-dandy dashboard and learned something interesting: I’m either going to be famous or I’m going to end up on a terrorist watch list.

A little background: I noticed that my page views were going up faster than they had been so I decided to look and see what was driving people to my humble blog. One of the first things I saw was a number of odd web pages listed as ‘Referring Sites,’ including buygenericsfromindia dot com (purposely ensuring this doesn’t show up as a link some innocent bystander can click) and baby-back-packs dot com.

Strange, yes.

But not as strange as a few of the ‘Search Keywords’ that led people to my blog. They start off innocently enough with: “little mermaid kiss the girl vocal only.” Not surprising at all, considering my blog in January, "The Little Mermaid," and Other Evil Deeds of the Disney Empire. Then I see that the terms “flash fiction post-apocalytpic best” and “post apocalyptic noir” referred people to the post-apocalyptic short story I posted. Still making sense.

I start really feeling odd when I see that the following search term has been entered:”ashley chappell Huntsville.” In other words, I have been Googled. While I waver between feeling pleased that someone bothered to look me up, I also find myself feeling, well, dirty.

But the final search phrase on the list is the one that causes me concern: “special ops mission chloroform.” Now I realize that this one must have led the searching party to my blog entitled Dietary Tactics: From Electroshock to Chloroform, but when I think about the kind of person that is likely to enter that specific search in a search engine only two images come to mind. 1) A fellow writer doing research for a thriller/suspense novel; and 2) a raving psychopath (not that 1 and 2 are always mutually exclusive, mind you). In fact, it also gives me a frame of reference for one of the other odd ‘Referring Sites’ that were listed: quiethits dot com. You can’t tell me that’s not a cover-up for a contract assassin employment service.

So now that I see the kind of searches in which my blog appears I can’t stop picturing a scenario in which I am abducted in the middle of the night by paramilitary thugs. When they finally remove the black bag from my head it’s to bombard me with questions about the secret communications I’m transmitting for the terrorists. “We have the proof right here, lady. Your blog is all over their search history. Just give us your contacts and we’ll put these rusty nails and jumper cables away.”

Coming up next week... look for an excessive amount of American flags, LOLcats, apple pie recipes, and Angry Birds tips. That ought to balance out my search results, right? RIGHT?