The Word Is Getting Out (To Some Pretty Damn Strange Places)

I may only have four readers¹ but today I got proof positive that my personal message is quietly taking the internet by storm

"How can this be when no-one reads your tripe?" I hear you ask. "Are you secretly trolling the web and "Digg"ing yourself into the heady world of fame and fortune, web-style?"

Ha! Fat chance. I've far more important things to do with my precious time than that².

No, I simply put the name of the blog into Google, arbiter of all things webby, and got back a staggering number of hits that didn't include a slew of references to Stevies Wonder, Nicks or Ray Vaughn. This marks a new high in the life of The Occasional Stevie. Only three months ago I had to jump through hoops just to get Google to acknowledge that my blog existed. Now, I get a good hit in the first three mentions and, after clicking "show me all the similar pages", I am bombarded by my own brilliance, exactly as I predicted I would be a mere twelve months ago. It won't be long before I can sell the whole thing to Bill Gates for a satisfyingly undisclosed sum.

There were one or two puzzling references though, I will admit.

I was quite surprised to find a reference from a rubberwear fetish agregator. I expect they found this episode and failed to discern the proper subtext³ and instead fixated on fiddling wardrobe choices. This sort of misunderstanding plagues my life as I've said before, and should I wish to take employment elsewhere, I am reliably informed that the would-be employer would almost certainly check the web for any "potential trouble" associated with my good name. This means that I am now locked into two choices: either staying where I am until retirement⁴ or working for somewhere like Damask that produces fetish rubberwear. Once again fame proves to be a double-edged sword.

There was also a reference in French. I do not speak French. I used to speak it badly. I was paid a large sum by a consortium of concerned French citizens to stop doing so altogether. It later turned out that the monies in question were a clever fiction, but I see no reason to break my side of the bargain just because the perfidious French did. Any Englishman knows you can't trust them. Agincourt, Crecy, Waterloo, Trafalgar: you could fill an atlas with the places the wily French have attempted to stick the boot⁵ in while the ink from the last peace treaty was still wet. I think the French web page was refering to the repair I made on my Casio digital saxaphone⁶ but in the absence of any French language skills of any note, I am only guessing and I don't recall putting that tale of heroic triumph over electronic perfidy in a world gone mad into The Occasional Stevie. I doubt this tale will impress a prospective employer either, the French still being about as popular as Benedict Arnold with most Americans owing to the fact that they didn't believe in Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now, of course, they are being unbearably smug about the whole thing. Of course, the French are nearly always unbearable and smug about something, so the effect is largely lost.

There was also a reference in a household appliance web aggregator. That has to be the washing machine debacle. Could be the dryer fiasco too, I suppose. Both appliances have attempted to stop working for a living recently, and have felt the might of my tool-armed response, not to mention a detailed report in these very pages.

It would seem that the web is teeming with references concerning me, and since I wrote most of them, they are likely showing me to good advantage even if no actual real people are accessing and reading them.

By Jove, I feel a renewed sense of renewal about the whole internet thing and my place in it.

1. Or possibly three: Steve the Oracle hasn't e-mailed me in an age so it's possible I've lost one somewhere↑
2. Besides, I didn't think of it↑
3. The one about improvisation in times of dire need, man's triumph over all things construction, the satisfaction of a job well done and so forth↑
4. Which I calculate should be sometime around 2362 AD↑
5. In the case of Trafalgar, the Sea-Boot↑
6. Mrs Stevie asked me one year what I wanted for Christmas. I told her I wanted some wild electric sex, and she "misheard"↑