The new header image

My thanks to Ed Wiancko for letting me use a great family photo of his for my new header image.

This site has nothing to do with rowboats but of course the majority of Google searches I get have to do with rowboats…and banana popsicles. I wrote about banana popsicles once or twice and now I’m the top search result for them. Go figure. I’ve written about thousands of other things and written about hundreds of things multiple times, but no one ever gets here looking for anything but banana popsicles and sometimes a rowboat query. I’m the top search result for rowboat and valiant but no one’s ever reached here using that query, but still they manage to get here on other rowboat queries that are totally irrelevant to this site as this site has nothing to do with literal rowboats and how to build them or what nude women may be riding around in them.

Google hates me. Kind of. It’s just that people don’t go looking for what I’ve got here (though I’ve written about all kinds of things).

I’m the top Google search result for subatomic penguins but no one gets here looking for information on that.

I’m the top Google search result for subatomic wonders but no one has ever gotten here looking for subatomic wonders.

I’m the top Google search result for Hanford declassified but no one has gotten here looking for information on that. But my Remixing the Hanford Declassified Project was once featured by Counterpunch on their website of the day.

I’m the third Google result for “Have you ever seen a UFO?” but I’ve yet to get anyone here using that query.

No, instead when I look at my Google search queries they are all about banana popsicles and rowboats, for which reason I may go for weeks without looking at the handful of Google search queries Google throws my way, mostly to do with banana popsicles and rowboats, which means I can’t say absolutely that no one has ever gotten here looking for Hanford declassified or subatomic penguins but if they’ve done so it’s been when I wasn’t looking.

Oh, I do get a lot of queries for my analysis of Antonioni’s “Blow Up” and occasionally for my analysis of Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”. Oddly enough, I will get universities like Berkeley that repeatedly visit the “Blow Up” review. I will see what appear to be the same people returning to look at these reviews several times, usually for the space of a week or two. Oddly, I used to get a number of hits from Beijing for my analysis of “Eyes Wide Shut”. I occasionally had people (never Americans) write me asking if they could use me as a resource in a thesis they were doing on film, but I haven’t had that happen in a while. Considering these university hits, I do wonder sometimes just what I’ve written that may have been paraphrased and used in a paper. And what kind of grade they got. Or maybe they’re just laughing behind my internet back.

It is funny to me that these people who will spend days reading posts like the Antonioni “Blow Up” analysis never write me.

No one ever writes me even to tell me what a jerk I am or how stupid I am. I read all the time about bloggers who have people write them telling them they are jerks. Or that they’ve enjoyed them. That doesn’t happen to me. People who drop by via Google never comment and never write me off line.

Someone did once comment, at Youtube, on a home video I’d done making a pair of Howard Hughes kleenex box shoes, so I could demonstrate how impossible small Howard Hughes feet must have been. For reasons only known to a certain sort of Youtube sensibility, they said they wished I would die. H.o.p. read it and got upset.

At least I don’t get a lot of people dropping by here using queries that make you want to gag.

I am also an odd kind of blogger. Occasionally something is in the news that I have written about (at least marginally) and suddenly I’ll get a throng of visitors on that subject. And what do I do when that happens? I usually, immediately take down that post for months. It weirds me out. For instance, I went through a spell of getting hundreds of queries going to a Rapiscan post I wrote, and so I took down that post because that weirded me out. And when there was news of Japanese committing suicide with hydrogen sulfide, I suddenly got hundreds visiting my innocuous post on how H.o.p. and I had done an innocuous little everyday electrolysis experiment, a side result of which had been the minor production of stinky hydrogen sulfide–and I immediately took down that post. I always plead it’s because I don’t have perhaps the bandwidth to support that number of visitors, when instead I just get weirded out.

Anyway, one day a couple of weeks ago I became curious about what it would be like if I did a row boat query myself. Wasting time is what you might call it. People got to me doing irrelevant row boat queries so I might as well do an irrelevant row boat query myself.

And then, because of this, I got to thinking that I should possibly redo my website and go ahead and look for a mundane non-copyright image of a rowboat in just the right position (straight shot from above) that I might be able to take and Photoshop this way and that and make it a part of a new header, because suddenly I was very bored with my blog appearance and wanted a new one.

The most marvelous image came up when I did a Google search for rowboat pictures. That of a man doing a handstand in a rowboat. It was an old family photo of Ed Wiancko’s.

A man doing a handstand in a rowboat seemed just the right image for a valiant little rowboat. I loved the audacity of that handstand.

So I wrote Ed Wiancko and asked if I could use that photo.

He said yes.

So there is the story of my new header image. A relative of Ed Wiancko’s could do handstands and loved doing them. He did a handstand in a rowboat and the rowboat didn’t tip over either.

Even better, he did that handstand in his hat!