back to the past

Sometime in 1990 . . .

Girl: Mom, what's the ethnic distribution of Ghana?
Mom: I don't know dear.
Girl: Well, how do I find out?
Mom: You could go to the library and look in an encyclopedia, see if it's in there.
Girl: I did already, no luck. Besides, the encyclopedias were five years old.
Mom: Did you ask any of your teachers at school?
Girl: I annoyed them so much about it they said, "If you don't shut up, I'm Ghana give you a detention."
Mom: Oh dear. Maybe you could find the number for the Ghanian Embassy and ask them.
Girl: Where is the Ghanian Embassy?
Mom: I'm not sure sweetie.
Girl: Thanks anyway mom.

The point of my little story is to demonstrate how powerful the internet is. Not powerful like a jet engine, but powerful like knowledge deluging. The oddly curious girl in our story would now, 15 years later, sit at her desk and maybe check out the CIA World Factbook to find that 16% of Ghanians are Moshi-Dagomba.

How did people find stuff out back then? The sheer difficulty of searching for these types of answers must have deterred all but the most determined of inquisitors. I was never one of those people. I was content to wallow in my own stupidity. I didn't know much, but I did get a lot of sleep.

I was thinking of this when I was looking at my Sitemeter stats. Sitemeter is a web service that counts how many people come to your website. In and of itself, not very compelling information since I figure I'm 80% of my own visitors. Sitemeter also tells you where the visits are from. This is where it gets interesting.

Of random visitors to the blog, some get here from search engines. I get a good number of visitors looking at my Planet of the Apes image . And a few take a gander at Brooks. But overwhelmingly, the most frequent search that shows up in my stats is "jlo's ass." Why? you ask. Well, I once wrote a whole thing about jlo's ass. (Before you click through, I should warn you - you will see no booty on that page. It's one of my stupid, imaginary celebrity news stories.)

Certainly, my story is about jlo's ass. While the internet is powerful, it is also easily confused, because if you were searching for jlo's ass and you came here, you would surely be disappointed. You don't want to read about jlo's ass personified; you want to SEE jlo's ass. My blog has nary a cheek of jlo's in sight. For that, I'm sorry. And maybe this will make it all better. I give you . . . jlo's ass: