Asshole

Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.

Internet search engines are fearful and powerful things. While googling my name today (look, it's one of the few vain activities left to me; my young adult daughters having, through ongoing ridicule and chortling, stripped me of all other vestiges of self-worth), I encountered the following link: Andy Whitman - Asshole.

My first thought was that the jig was up. I had been found out: utterly unemployable, frequently despondent, and now revealed as a major, miserable whoreson, for all the computer-literate world to see. My second thought was to wonder who had so categorized me, and what had brought about such a dire pronouncement. I clicked on the link.

It turns out that there are websites out there that compile words used on the Internet. This particular website/robot/thingie had been programmed to ferret out the word "asshole." There were pages and pages of links containing the word "asshole." One of them was a link to a recent posting of mine where I had referenced the name of a Martha Wainwright song called "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole."

I am intrigued. For any of you cyber-security gurus out there, who looks at these lists of words? What are they looking for? How do you know if you're in trouble? On one hand, I guess I can understand it . Somebody needs to keep track of the nutjobs out there who write about "as*assi&at#ng Ob@ma" I hope somebody's keeping track of that. But asshole? What possible value does an alphabetically compiled list of postings containing the word "asshole" provide?