Reaching my blog

A site meter incorporated in my blog tells me the paths by which users have found Antipodes. Often, I'm greatly amused by the terms that people use in search engines prior to being directed to my blog. Guys searching for soft porn have often been directed to my blog posts here and here... which are not even smutty enough to offend a Catholic archbishop. This morning, I was amused to see that an Indian gentleman, having submitted to Ask the single search term "bigdirtyimage", was led to my quite serious blog post entitled Dirty talk [display], which was basically a pretext enabling me to praise the brilliant handling of sexually-explicit language by the Harvard professor Steven Pinker. My Indian reader was surely disappointed.

The Ask search engine used to be called Ask Jeeves. We all know that Reginald Jeeves was a very correct English valet in the P G Wodehouse novels, and he had subtle answers enabling his master—an upper-class chap named Bertie Wooster—to get out of all sorts of nasty predicaments. Intrigued by the Indian fellow's discovery of my blog, I decided to test the Ask device.

Sure enough, surprisingly, my blog post comes up on the first page of links. More surprisingly still, the very first suggestion from Ask is a nice website with flowery rainbow images of a wallpaper variety.

All I can say is that Jeeves, in spite of his unquestionable skills in answering embarrassing questions, seems to have displayed an amazing dearth of intuition concerning what the Indian gentleman was really looking for when he cried out "bigdirtyimage".