The rank of love, Part 3: john love

The continuing saga of how to find john love in the Google search engine.

I discovered in late December that my main web site, ejohnlove.com is back at #1 in the Google search engine again! If you enter the word john followed by a space, and then the word love and hit enter, my web site pops up at number one out of over 23 million search results.

I was afraid that after losing this wonderful ranking a few months ago, it would never happen again, but I suppose the loss was only a temporary one, possibly Google doing a clean-up or re-evaluation of it's data, or something.

Anyway, people seem to search for john love in Google every day. I don't know what they're looking for exactly, but if it was me, at least I know I'm not that hard to find. (I guess that's a good thing. I still haven't decided why I think it's a good thing...)

Blue Knob??

I guess this just proves how sick I am...

Today, as I was working on one of my employer's commercial listings pages, I ran across these company names:

Blue Knob Vacation Rentals
Beaver Creek Vacation Rentals

...and I just couldn't stop laughing...

Who the heck names their company "Blue Knob" anyway? Only someone living in Blue Knob, Pennsylvania, I guess...

...but who named the town?

I'm sure it's probably a lovely town, but is it really cold there?

Now here's a Sexy Beast...

Now here's a Sexy Beast... (taken from "The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla's Weblog")

"Yeeaaahhh... Work it... work it... Ohhh yeeaaaah... You're sexy..."

(whispering) "Um, Bill, why is there a Macintosh on the desk back there? Maybe we should move that?

Whaddya mean 'Shut up and immortalize my sexy greatness'... Fine..."

Click. Poof.

...and thus, a soon-to-be reviled software demi-god stumbles into the centrefold for the 1981 issue of Byte magazine (or wherever the hell this piece of shmaltz was published...)

Is it just me, or does this dude look exhausted. Get some sleep Bill! Like just put your head right down on that monitor and close your eyes.

Is that shirt on correctly? Is that arrow pointing the right way?

The last few weeks have been full of sad news; of large and small losses. By various unrelated circumstances, four people have left my work in as many weeks. This to me, seems like some kind of negative record. This is just my subjective opinion.

But I'm not used to getting wounded by a bunch of little paper cuts: "#1 Ouch, that hurt. I'll miss working with that person. Sigh. Get over it and adapt. #2 Ouch - that hurt. Sigh..." etc. etc. I think the proper phrase is "death by a thousand cuts" or something. I'm not used to this. I'm used to a full-on, glorious group beheading; to the whole blamed company going down the tubes, with a big layoff of the staff, whereafter a bunch of us might run into each other at the E.I. office the next morning. You know, big and agonizingly painful, not just small and slightly depressing.

It could just be some displaced guilt on my part, due to the fact that I'm still around. It's probably unwarranted or stupid for me to even entertain any guilty conscience. Maybe it's that I'm used to feeling a lot worse than this. (That sounds backwards.) Maybe it's just the residual after-taste from dozens of "goodbye" cakes. They taste nice at the time, but can repeat on ya later... (ah, finaly, a metaphor I can sink my teeth into.)

Top this whining off with killer tsunamis, feeling sad for other coworkers who are suffering through family losses and grief, or news stories of people freezing to death on the streets. And in the foreground of all of this stuff, my regular monthly cycle of not being able to get my work completed quickly enough. I feel like I've been apologizing for little failings for weeks now.

There definitely are happy, positive, or successful moments where I feel gratified again - proud of my accomplishments and of how I try to treat my friends, family or coworkers. However, sometimes it's difficult to keep the happy thoughts balanced in mind alongside the unhappy thoughts.

Today, I was having a bite of lunch in the school's dining hall with my coworker Carol. She asked me what my t-shirt said. It's a Christmas present from my in-laws that says "I'm with Stoopid" with an arrow that points up. (I'm quite proud to wear it, really.)

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"Huh? 'I'm with stupid', but the arrow points up." I made a gesture towards my chin and smiled cheesily.

"Where are you pointing? To god?" she asked, looking to the ceiling and laughing.

Wow. Good one, I thought to myself later on.

If a god is up there somewhere (and as an ahtiest, I'm not saying I would believe in him/her/them/it even if he/she/they/it did exist), then I think that such a being must have a wicked, dark sense of humour.

A buddhist would tell me that the dark humour is all my own. Maybe *I* really am with stupid. :)

I can't wait for Spring, when things begin to grow and bloom again...

"The Day Undramatic" with John Love

Today I watched the movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou at Cinemark Tinseltown.

What sucked me into this film in the first place was the overall quirkiness of the production, which to me had hints of the Beatles or Monty Python fantasy elements, and the right-on soundtrack (a Devo song - yay!).

Afterwards, I got an Americano and headed outide into the early afternoon sun. It was weird and lucky to find a spot at end of a sidewalk bench where the sun hid perfectly behind the silhouette of the street signals.. I HATE sun in my eyes. I knew in a minute or so the sun would creep around that lamp and get me right in the eyes. Oh well. The air was crisp and the coffee hot, and there was nowhere I had to be anytime soon.

After my coffee was done, I took the Skytrain all the way out to Surrey and back, just because I hadn't been out that way in many years. Overall, it was a nice little day.

The Return of Dad's Old Chair

(A continuation of Dad's Old Chair...)

Yesterday, I came home and saw something I didn't think I'd see again - right in the middle of our kitchen floor. It was my Dad's old wheelchair.

After my Dad passed away in 1989, my father in law agreed to keep it at his house in case it was ever needed (and plus, he had the space for it).

Back in March 2004, we learned that the Grandmother of one of my wife's oldest friends could use a wheelchair, so Dad's chair ended up going into service for our friend's dear old Nana.

Unfortunately, her Nana passed away not too long ago, and the chair came back home here with us.

Seeing it once more was not something I ever expected, and my wife Grace was convinced that I would become depressed just at the sight of it (which had happened to me before upon seeing it back in March).

But this time when I saw the chair, it was more like seeing a familiar face. I was happy to see it! I think I felt more sentimental about it as a symbol of usefulness and service than as a symbol of suffering and incapacity. It had performed it's job for Dad, and then again for our friend's Nana, and now I got a chance to see it once again and to be tangibly reminded of my Dad.

I got out my camera and took a few pictures of it, with no clear idea why, except that I wanted to have some evidence for when the chair would once again be gone, probably for good. It might sound weird, but it was very important to me at the time.

Tempting fate (and by "fate", I mean my propensity towards mild depression at this time of year), I sat down in Dad's wheelchair for a few minutes. I wheeled around a bit in our little hall and kitchen area, and thought about the effort it takes to navigate on wheels using just your arms (or in my Dad's case, using one arm and two feet).

Both my parents spent years of their life confined to wheelchairs. Even with the idea of wheels, and the mobility implied by them, it must, I'm sure, also be like rolling around inside a little steel cage. Freedom, from inside a rolling enclosure.

Maybe after a while, it becomes more like the relationship I used to have with my bicycle. Up until I was 19, I rode a bike everywhere, and almost never took the bus. When I was using it, my bike became an extension of my body and senses. On the road, I was the bike and the bike was me. When I wasn't riding it, I saw it as a trustworthy, dependable tool, without which I would be less capable.

Maybe that's the feeling I had seeing the old wheelchair again: "There's good ol' trusty, ready for another assignment."

So, I think it's likely that Dad's old wheelchair may next be donating it's services at the senior's care centre next door.

A one-man show at the Big News Cafe...

Outside the Big News cafe at Granville and Broadway, a homeless guy asked me for 2 bucks for a coffee (exactly $2.09 to be precise) and I gave it.

Inside he asked a young guy to buy him something to eat. The young guy quietly said no each time Homeless asked. Homeless gave up and, as he added cream to his coffee, muttered "You never do nothin for me. Never do nothin. Don't care about no one. You never do nothin for me."

Young guy didn't seem to notice this. It was obvious he didn't know Homeless, and to me it looked like he wasn't the real target of the older man's bitterness. So Homeless kept muttering to some personal ghost of lost Christmasses past, and then suddenly rushed out of the store as if he were trying to catch a bus (there was no bus).

As I had watched Homeless muttering bitterly at theyoung guy, it struck me that his misdirected rant was possibly a more honest display of his feelings - his psychological repetoire - than some healthy people would display. It was an overt and visible demonstration of some letdown from his past. Someone else had said no to him before - maybe someone important like a friend or family member. Now it was stuck in him like a tape loop now, waiting for the trigger to trip it into action. But at least he had an outlet, I guess.

The rank of love, Part 2: e john love

...or "SERPing high and low"

...or "Looking for Love" ("Wooking puh nub" if there are any old-school E. Murphy fans)

It is official: through some unforeseen "Act of Google(tm)", neither my personal web site nor this blog are ranked in the top 10 in Google for the search phrase john love. For an excited few weeks there, I was number one out of over 22 Million results.

A few times, I caught myself caressing the word "milliion" with my tongue like some Dr. Evil-meets-Carl Sagan love child. It sounds so nice to say "twenty two mm-mmmillllionn!" But, I knew it was too good to last for long... :(

Google finally got around to doing housekeeping in some dusty corner of whichever datacentre my site had managed to wedge itself near the top. It doubtless said "What the...?", and then flung my site's listing down into the depths of Google SERP purgatory... :D

However, hope springs eternal, as (cue the mass 'woo-hoos') I am still numero uno out of 15.7 M. results under the slightly less generic phrase e john love.

Here we go again...