Monday, November 29, 2010

The Power Of My Archives

When you have over 1,000 posts on the internet, as I do at this blog, it starts getting interesting. Because you have readers hitting them all the time, things from years ago, and sometimes I wonder how they got to the random post. They go on like residuals, or reruns, or golden oldies.

Approximately 20% of my posts come from the time I was the philosophical father of the Residential Industrial Movement. At that time, I had my own electrical generating plant and my own tire factory. That really struck a chord with people, believe me, and it continues to this day!

You'd think people would have enough tires in their lives, but you couple the fact that people simply like tires with the idea that you can make a fortune off them, of course there's going to be an enduring interest there. So a couple of my most popular posts have to do with making tires, how to get your own tire company up and running. I myself no longer do this, since the Residential Industrial Movement was destroyed. But that doesn't affect my archives. So there's always someone hitting these two posts: "The Black Smoke of Industry" and "My Tire Industry Rolls On."

They want to know how it's done, how to make tires! So they read a little bit and it starts something. Then they often write me for more information, exactly how they would go about starting their own tire factory. I tell them all the same thing, that you better love hard work and long hours. And that you may as well kiss your family goodbye right now, because you're either going to neglect them to do the work, or you're going to lose them in the work. Like if you have the kids helping you, sooner or later they're going to fall into a vat of something, get crushed, or be overcome by toxic fumes. It's an unbelievable story but a true one.

Still, there's hardly any swaying some of these people. Because all they can think of is the big money. They're reasoning that every car needs four tires and one in the trunk, making five. We all know a tire is between $80 and $120, then with all the add-ons -- balancing, alignment, old tire disposal fee, white walls, air spigot, tread polish, miscellaneous service fees, federal and state surcharges, gauges, lug nut snuggies, and even air, which is going up all the time thanks to inflation -- you're looking at an average cost of $500 per tire.

That may sound like big money, and that's as far as the dreamers look, but think, most cars already have five tires. No one's starting from scratch. You're not going to have a car drive in to your factory on nothing but metal rims with an empty trunk. You're going to have to wait for their old set to fizzle out, and in the meantime you're looking at a mountain of inventory and supplier bills you wouldn't believe. Because the fact is, people hardly ever really need a new tire. Real life isn't like NASCAR, where they're changing tires every 20 miles.

OK, putting that one aside -- that gets a lot of hits. But you want to know the biggest search phrases that bring people to my archives? You're not going to believe this. There's two big ones: "If you see a red dog running free" is one of them. I wrote a post on the song "Abergavenny" one time. And ever since then, on a daily basis, there's someone in the world looking for information about that. To me, that's wild, because this isn't a Beatles' song or something extremely popular; it's obscure.

The other big search phrase is a lot more scandalous, and it's this: "undress grandma." Seriously. I just shake my head. Because, believe it or not, there's lots of perverts out there constantly googling for information on how to undress their grandma! I get letters on this too, which I completely ignore, since I have no way of getting a reliable affidavit signed that says they need the information for legitimate purposes. As far as I'm concerned, in the absence of those assurances, to me these people are nothing but perverts. The irony here is that this post today has the phrase in it again and so this will also be a drawing card for that crowd!

Anyway, what's so hard about figuring out how to undress grandma? You do it the same way as any other woman, just perhaps without the same urgency. I hope that's true. I've undressed mine many times -- there's no thrill to it. It's all for purposes of hygiene or changing clothes. Nothing lascivious. I'm like a doctor. And I look away a lot. There's still things I haven't actually seen ... clearly ...

Of course there's grandmas out there who don't have my grandma's hard years on them -- she's 104. You get one of the ones who was pregnant in high school, then her daughter was also pregnant in high school, I guess you could easily have a grandma in her upper 30s. But face it, the grandkid's still got a ways to go, no matter what Freud says, before he's going to be consciously looking for action. By then she's in her '50s ... which, I guess that's not so bad. Still, she's your grandma, for crying out loud! Get a girlfriend your own age!

So I'm not too happy about that traffic. But what can you do? I'd love to put a parental lock (or a grandparental lock) on their computers, but I'm limited in my abilities to do so. I have no ability to do that.

The power of my archives! Everyone should try it. Get your own blog, write a bunch of stuff, and watch the world beat down your door!

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