One of the interesting aspects of writing a blog is the weft and weave of the ‘conversation’ that it becomes. I write something, people comment, we have a conversation, sometimes we continue that conversation elsewhere. We have in-jokes, and shared memories. We have running gags and traditions and circles of friends who pop up with insights and laughs and just plain ol’ howdy-doodies. It’s kind of like a never-ending cocktail party.

And every now and and then, a very strange person wanders in and sticks their finger in the cheese & onion dip.

You probably won’t have much awareness of what goes on behind the scenes at The Cow at any given time, except maybe for most recent few posts & comments. But sometimes, long after a post has been written, commented on, pinged & trackbacked & faded into blogscurity, a new comment appears. Usually it is just a person who has stumbled on The Cow via a link, or a search for something tangential to the post’s topic – normal people who leave normal (and often, very nice) observations. Sometimes it’s some nutcase with an obsession (check the Peter Popoff posts if you care – they attract loonies like corpses attract flies). And sometimes there are things that are just plain weird.

This morning, Atlas Cerise and I had cause to revisit this post – it’s my dissertation on why clever special effects don’t necessarily add anything to movies. It was the second part of a two-part post and the Cownoscenti had quite a good discussion about the whys and wherefores of moviedom. And if you read down the comments you will see the conversation ends rather naturally after a few days. Then, more than a year later someone who identifies himself* as mnorgovudkka says:

Hy my name is mnorgovudkka
Im from mongolia
Buy

Like a goth wandering through the front gate after the last guests have left, mnorgovudkka stands blinking in the bright porch light for a few seconds before shuffling back off into the shadows.

Mostly, I delete these kinds of daft ‘comments’ (and mostly they are linked to a site that I guess is some kind of spamming deal), but I left mnorgovudkka‘s comment because I thought it was kind of entertaining. It wasn’t linked to anything and it didn’t seem to be meaningful in any way – something wacky and pointless for people to find if they were reading back through the archives (kinda like Malach’s comments). It would have been far more amusing if mnorgovudkka had come from Romania, but hey.

Sure enough, during our conversation this morning, Atlas pointed the comment out to me, and I was kinda glad that he’d stumbled across mnorgovudkka‘s nutty noodling. But then, on a whim I plugged ‘mnorgovudkka’ into a Google search, and bugger me! 7690 hits! And guess what? Pretty much all of them seem to be mnorgovudkka‘s same daft comment. In internet terms, mnorgovudkka is a veritable internet celebrity!

For some reason, though, Google thought I’d made a mistake and helpfully suggested that maybe I didn’t mean to search for ‘mnorgovudkka’, but rather ‘morgovudka’, which makes equally as little sense. OK, I’m game, let’s see… clicking on ‘morgovudka’ returns exactly NO hits! Thank you Google, but where did you GET that name from, if there are no hits for it? WHERE? Did you make it up? Are you in cahoots with mnorgovudkka?

And, now that I’m blogging about this, I expect I’ve completely ruined the whole point of that last question because ‘morgovudka’ will return hits to this page! So the Google search will have become meaningful just because this whole series of bizarre events happened!!!

It’s like some freaky self-referential time warp and I’m trapped in it! SOMEBODY HELP ME!

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*Of course, mnorgovudkka could just as easily be female, but somehow…

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