Tetherd Cow Ahead

Top Ten searches that have brought people to Tetherd Cow Ahead in recent times. Sister Veronica sends a big shout out to all you wasp-loving Renaissance art perverts!

Faithful Acowlytes! For your convenience I have now installed threaded comments on The Cow. I’m not sure I entirely like this idea, since I think it probably stops the ‘flow’ of commenting slightly, but since it’s become de rigeur most everywhere else I want to make sure I’m keeping up with the Joneses.

You will also find that your comments are editable as well, so Queen Willy can now go back and correct her own typos instead of asking me to do it.

:-b

Enjoy!

Every now and then out of curiosity I check the server statistics for Tetherd Cow to see who visits, from where, and what they’re interested in. Mostly it’s boring. Occasionally it’s baffling. This is one of those times. I mean, veronica, rasputin and shoo tag scam, sure no problem. Famous mirrors, yup. Old ‘adds’ – I guess.

But fanny as the number one term? Really? Just go over to the side bar search button, Acowlytes, and do a search for fanny. You get one hit – this post. And yet the number one search term bringing people to Tetherd Cow Ahead this last month, with 71 requests, is fanny. What the crap is that about?

And as for girl sucks cow singsong…

I’m sure most of you have already figured it out, but I just wanted to explain the little signifiers[tippy title=”*”]Like this one.[/tippy] that I’ve been using in posts over the last few weeks. As you will have no doubt figured out by now, I am very fond of footnotes when I’m writing,[tippy title=”†”]…because they act like little asides. Sometimes I want to ‘comment’ on something, but also not interfere with the flow of the story.[/tippy] but since this is a hyperlink medium I’ve always found it a little irritating to make it necessary for my readers to have to scroll to the bottom of the page to read the jolly asides.[tippy title=”‡”]See how much I care about you all![/tippy] It’s especially annoying in long posts, and I fear that it is actually more upsetting to the flow of the narrative than if I’d actually chucked the comment in at the time.

In the modern world of internet communication, where we should not be under the thrall of rigid page-based text, it seemed to me odd that there was no way of ‘hyper-commenting’ on what I was writing. For a while I tried a plug-in called Tippy that was promising, but it was buggy and refused to work properly under Safari.

Well I am pleased to say that Tippy is now fully functional and after trialling it for a few weeks I am satisfied that it will be reliable enough to install permanently here on The Cow.

So, now when you see the little red characters popping up here and there, all you need to do is hover your mouse over the symbol and you will see the footnote. It will fade away once you move your mouse off again. If there is a link in the footnote, you can click on it and it will activate in a new window.[tippy title=”**”]Try it! Cool
huh?![/tippy]

I’ll still keep the footnotes at the bottom of the posts for all you Old School types who refuse to have anything to do with this new-fangled quantum-digital-electromagnetic-fields jiggery-pokery, but for the rest of you, I hope this new functionality[tippy title=”††”]
– what I shall henceforth dub ‘dynamic meta-commenting’…[/tippy] adds a new level of smoothness and enjoyment to your Cow experience.

Thank you for your attention. We now resume normal programming.

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*Like this one.

†…because they act like little asides. Sometimes I want to ‘comment’ on something, but also not interfere with the flow of the story.

‡See how much I care about you all!

**Try it! Cool huh?!

††- what I shall henceforth dub ‘dynamic meta-commenting’…

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By way of explanation…

John A Karr asked in the last post’s Comments:

… where this weird icon thingee come from beside my posts? Deviltry!

Have no fear John! It is not the Devil at work at all! I’ve enabled Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars) on my commenting to allow you all to affix little images to your names – you’ve no doubt seen them at work on other blogs. I like the little pictures attached to people’s names. I think they make the threading and comment flow a lot easier to follow, and they also add a bit of character to the conversation.*

Anybody can make a Gravatar – just go here and you will get all the info you need. A Gravatar is attached to an email address, so once you have one, it will be used on any and all Gravatar enabled sites where you comment.

If you don’t have a Gravatar, however, here on The Cow you will be assigned a Wavatar, and that is the little face about which John is asking. Wavatars are designed by Shamus Young at Twenty Sided, and are very clever. Based on the information in the email address you use to comment, Shamus’ Wavatar code ‘rolls’ you a unique Wavatar that will consistently appear wherever you use that email address (on Wavatar enabled sites, obviously). Shamus calculates that there are 55 billion possibilities for unique Wavatars, so the likelihood that your Wavatar will look like someone else’s is vanishingly small.

I don’t mind how you choose to proceed on The Cow – I like the Wavatars a lot because they seem quite amusing, but feel free to create and use a Gravatar if you prefer. If you choose to comment anonymously, then no image is assigned at all.

This has been a Tetherd Cow Ahead Public Service Announcement.

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*And I intensely dislike the embedded ‘Reply’ function that’s popped up on many platforms recently – in my opinion it encourages people to read only their comments and the replies to their comments, which I feel is contrary to the blogging community spirit.

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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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