Attractive ghouls

I ended another rotation of work this morning. I came home by way of the Krispy Kreme in Scranton and picked up a late Mother's Day gift for my mom. I then did a bit of a tour of downtown Scranton while trying to get back to the highway, and drove past what I have always imagined to be the site of The Office's Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company - 600 Linden Street. (It actually houses offices for several Certified Public Accountants.) Got home, and after dealing with a surprisingly powerful nosebleed (no idea where that came from) got to work weedwhacking at about 7:45 in the morning. After a bit of time trying to catch up on Facebook and my list of daily blog reads, I went to bed and slept like I was dead for a solid six hours.

After waking, eating, and showering, it was time to take my mom grocery shopping one last time until late June, unless I am laid off for any of the intervening Tuesdays. By the time we wrapped things up the drizzle had turned into a pouring rain, which made bringing the groceries back into the house that much more fun.

I fired up the computer and went online. After scanning my inbox, checking Facebook updates and reviewing any new blog posts, I decided to do something I haven't done in a while: check my Sitemeter page ranking to see what was leading people to my blog, at least for the last 100 visits.

I'm always glad to see visitors coming in by way of the main page, because this usually means that there was some intentionality to their visit - they weren't just arriving because they were following a link to a specific post, or coming by way of a search engine, but were just coming to my blog. Twelve out of the most recent hundred were like that.

The next three most popular entry pages weren't a surprise. Eleven visitors for Cathy Baker and/or Hee Haw, six for The Strange Case of the Headless Rabbit, four for the perennial Firefox js3250.dll glitch. And in the fifth position* was this post:

Another Monkey: Pareidolia: Ghouls in the Carina Nebula

Why? I went though the details of Sitemeter to find out.

The earliest visit was #176,449 and was from Bourges, France at 8:26 this morning. It came in on an image search. The image was this one, the first one in the post.

The next visit was #176,464 from Stevens Point, Wisconsin at 12:15 this afternoon. It was also an image search, for the same image as the previous one.

Then there came visit #176,470 from Adelphia, Italy at 1:13 P.M. Image search, same image. Hmmm...

The fourth and, so far, final visit to this post was #176,484 from Clermont, Florida at 4:10 PM. This time the search was not an image search, but a text search that was worded in a way that would be more appropriate for an Artificial Intelligence search engine than a text/image-based search engine like Google. The search was "do any one see a face in the carina nebula" - and I guess the answer, based on the results of this search, is "yes, quite a few people!"



*Actually this is a four-way tie with the Firefox entry, this one on Marcellus Shale, and for some reason the January 2009 archive page.