My dear, departed mother decided to spell my name with two ‘l’s because she didn’t want anybody pronouncing it “colon,” as in Colin Powell, not that this has done a lot of good. But here’s something that’ll have her spinning in her grave.
The WordPress program tells me what search terms are leading visitors to my website. This morning I found something kind of enigmatic. One visitor had used “how to do your own natural collin cleans,” and was led to “Magic potion revealed!”: This search could have come from Bulgaria or Turkmanistan, of course, and I’m not making fun. But someone evidently believes “colon” is spelled “collin,” and my mother would not be pleased.
Ideally, people would eventually be led to my musings by way of such terms as “red-hot writer,” “Shakespeare reincarnate,” and “novels demanding translation into Hollywood blockbusters.” In the meantime, I’m getting lots of people coming to “Magic potion revealed!” through “cinnamon bark,” “turmeric,” and so on, probably expecting to find a dedicated health, sex & longevity site or maybe a good bakery. It could be I need guidance in SEO, “search engine optimization.”
The “collin cleaning” search suggests the Internet spiders or bots, or whatever they are, assume my blogsite is more New Agey than it really is. But what the hell—if this hooks a New Agey book publisher or Hollywood producer, then fine by me. If the tackle works, why not keep trolling with it, eh? So tomorrow (or the next day, or sometime) I’m going to talk about my actual experience of colonic cleansing (this was in the writerly line of duty) and my attitude towards that whole line of territory.
“Bright side to the Gulf oil spill,” meanwhile, has been another big draw, this past couple of months. In part that’s because I used Spencer Tunick mass-nude photos to illustrate it. So “mass nudes,” “thailand nude,” “tunick” and suchlike are also pumping up my figures.
(On some other occasion, exploring the world of stylish punctuation, I may well discuss the ins and outs of colons vs. m-dashes. This will no doubt disappoint yet another bunch of individuals with contaminated colons or whatever it is that leads people to cleansing programs.)