I have a counter that tracks hits on ArtandLife, a component of which lists the search terms used by the last twenty visitors in the form you see below:



This isn't a particularly unusual selection. Some of them seem obvious: “photographs of San Francisco”, “images of pretty woman”; some of them make you wonder: “house of sixty fathers (characters)” - Chinese characters?; some are off the wall: “when I have often heard young maids complaining” - words from a folk song, a quote from some old English text? And some, well, one or two you hope weren't made by anyone who lives next door, in your town or on your side of the ocean.

Two days ago I added the counter to a couple of pages I've always wondered about because they kept coming up on the counter on my journal menu page. I don't track individual journal entries - no reason to, no one's going to come back to them often enough to make a difference. One page, however, has had 565 hits since in was posted in January 2003, and I wondered how many hits it was really getting because the 565 only counts those who'd gone to the journal page from this page and not those who had gone to the page and then gone somewhere else.

So I added the code and checked an hour later. Three hits were registered in the course of an hour. Whoa. Where were they coming from? It turns out they're coming from people searching for pictures captioned “strip club(s)” and I did take the photograph, in fact, years ago at a press performance at a San Francisco strip club. I shouldn't have been surprised, but my guess is it's had five or six thousand hits since it was posted, more I'm sure than any other page or group of pages in the journal.

Which means?

Nothing, really. Not a bad picture and it was fun to take: half the reporters in San Francisco including Herb Caen were at that press performance and, I seem to recall, the performers made a special effort to, um, play to the one idiot who'd brought a camera.