Stitches That Thrill

Now, just to be clear, I really don't obsess over this blog's stats. I keep an eye on them just to know what kind of posts people like best. (For the record, the far and away most popular post is Wendell Castle's 10 Adopted Rules of Thumb. Nothing I wrote!) My usual daily hits are somewhere between 100 and 150 a day, and I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's fine with me. I assume that a percentage of those hits are from real people.

So last night before I turned the computer off I thought I would check how things were with the old blog, and was very surprised to see that at one point last week there were over 350 hits. A little further investigation and I think most of those came from Chinese robots. I checked the most popular search words and "stitches thrill" was on top. To me these two words make sense, but I doubt they would occur to most people. So I can only assume the robots were sifting the internet with random combinations of potentially stimulating words, hoping to find the magic pairing that would increase their client's orders for Viagra. (Isn't that what most spam is all about?)

So, I Googled "stitches thrill". The first forty matches were all to do with the lyrics to some Ozzy Osbourne song. The man has a bizarre way with words.

Then, I went to images and was very surprised to see some of my own photos in the line up. This may have been due to some sort of cookie Google has that optimizes my search to find places it thinks will interest me, but I had a browse through anyway. All I can do is repeat my eternal refrain: "The world is a very strange place."

Click to make bigger.

 Here's part of a screen shot. A nice embroidered picture of a fifth wheel, a cute little quilt for teddy bears, some machine embroidery stitches, and ...YUCK! Some kind of mangled body part.

This unusual pairing caught my eye as well. Is is a coincidence that the haircuts of the singing guy in the second row and the kid with blood all over his face at the end of the third row are almost identical? And what strange algorithms put them in amongst the knitting and mending?

Check out the bottom row in particular. A sore-looking foot, a needlepoint book and some gruesome home surgery.

I have been known to venture into the extreme side of stitching now and then, like the time I sewed up a chicken that had been attacked by a mink. And then there was the Human Pincushion episode of last fall. But for the most part I like to keep my stitching thrills and my body parts separate. To each her own, I suppose.