Friday, January 22, 2010

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?

3 comments:

hallga77 said...

Maybe a proctologist is just trolling for more business.

rms said...

i'd rather be an a-hole then what i have found our about my self on the interweb: and furthermore: wot i have found out the interwebs has claimed to say i have said about others!
..
sometimes these sort of things make me want to crawl strait up inside mine own a-hole and remain there forever! [figuratively speaking of course!]

EricE said...

Dennis Leary fans?