How to Find Art With Stock Shot Male Bums
by James Roland
Exactly how useful are internet search engines? In the case of a fledgling art magazine, the answer is ‘very,’ but maybe not in the way you might think.
Basically, the internet is a giant water cooler where every person in the world can come and shoot the irreverent breeze. The real power of the internet is not free, unlimited press or the ability to share files instantly around the Earth. No, the real power of the internet lies in random videos of cats falling off of television sets and online comics about ninjas who are also doctors and possibly Irish.
I am under the personal conviction (which is rapidly approaching cult-mania levels) that The Net has become a vortex to another, very silly dimension. I think it’s where Popeye comes from.
For those of us serious surfers (ie, fledgling art magazines looking for a reader base), the Popeye Dimension Variable can work to your advantage. Take last month’s search engine results that led many inter-dimensional travelers to www.redfenceproject.com:
Over 17 percent came from a search for the word haleskarth, a word SO OLD that it doesn’t appear on dictionary.com or Wikipedia. This word actually appears in Jason Helms’s review of Only Revolutions and sounds like a neck-covering the Scottish would use to protect themselves from falling ice; I tried to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, but I don’t want to drive to a library and I’m not going to pay for an internet subscription (who wants to put toll roads on the inter-dimensional highway?).
The next two top searches that found RedFence are pretty self-explanatory: mitch hale (a celebrated stage and television director whose name appears in Ruth’s review of a still small voice) and, of course, redfence.
But here it starts to get weird. Along with two straightforward searches – evan shultz (a RedFence staff writer) and natasha wightman pictures as Valerie (an actress from V for Vendetta who is mentioned in my blog review) – there are also stock shots male bums and they drove by and threw something at us dorks. The first one will take you to the Fencepost section of our website, where I happened to mention a “caustic male bum”, an “ex male hooker”, and “WWII stock footage.”
they drove by and threw something at us dorks will lead you to a story I wrote called The Strangest Thing on Kane Street that happens to share the words ‘they,’ ‘drove,’ and ‘threw’ with this weird word combination.
I’ve decided to travel to the Popeye Dimension myself. I started with a few random phrases that popped into my head and this is where they led me:
The words randy go kill soft took me to a blog called Randy’s Epilogue. Randy lives in Washington State and worries about the environment. I didn’t read through all his posts, but I hope I haven’t stumbled upon a Green Peace terrorist plot.
My next attempt was fire unicorn Toyota which took me to a helicopter charter company and giant apes live in my head took me to www.theresanelson.net, the personal website of a woman who tended her home while her husband served in Vietnam, packed up her three kids, and toured for two and a half years with a traveling theatre company, and now resides in Sherman Oaks, California where she writes children’s books.
Finally, I mustered the courage and went directly to the source. I typed in the key words that would take me to the controlling force, the demi-god, if you will, of the Popeye Dimension. Trembling, hoping for answers, I typed in the following words:
Popeye Dimension Variable
The answer, my friends, can be found on the second page, in the fifth entry:
An Examination of the Relationship Between Employee Behavior/ Non-Behavior and Customer Satisfaction in Quick Service Restaurants.
Be at peace.
