Dustbury has a long-running series called Strange Search Engine Queries where he rounds up the week’s strangest search engine queries that lead people to his site. I would do a series like that, but I don’t have my stat counter configured properly (or don’t pay enough) to see search engine queries leading to my site, and I don’t get enough traffic weekly to warrant it. I’m pretty sure most of the search engine queries are looking for book reports to plagiarize for books I’ve read, particularly The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.
However, I have gotten asked some strange questions in real life.
Oh, you have a library?
I forget what I was talking about with the school secretary, but I mentioned having a large library, and she asked this question.
Do I have a library? I do.
That image is from the Noggle Library 2010 post. In the intervening time, we have gotten even more books, but only one new small book case. We have a little space in the basement these days, so perhaps I should get a couple more to spread them out.
I used this question as a pretext for going to ABC Books in December; I told Ms. Earhart, the shops proprietor, that I needed just a couple more books to make my library more notorious. That was the first of three trips to ABC Books in late December. Surely, my library is notorious now.
Have either one of you been a dungeon master?
A friend at the martial arts school I attend asked my wife this question because her son was interested in tabletop RPGs.
A dungeon master? I’ve done more than that.
As a reminder, I have all my old RPG stuff handy, too.
I’ve run games in:
- Dungeons and Dragons
- Villains and Vigilantes
- Twilight: 2000
- Call of Cthulhu
- Paranoia
- Marvel Superheroes
- Dangerous Journeys
And so on.
You’ve written a book?
I get asked this all the time. I’m not the best at IRL self promotion (and my Online Brand either, judging by the number of books sold), so sometimes my beautiful wife brings it up in conversation that I’ve published a book. Well, technically, I’ve published a novel, a book of plays, and two chapbooks of poetry. I don’t need to put a picture of my book below because they’re in the sidebar (well, not Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows, the aforementioned poems). You can click and buy them if you want.
Back in the 1990s, I listed them on Basement Full of Books, and the listing is still up. However, I no longer live in Lemay. Funny, only when looking for the listing now did I realize the list was initially created by Vonda McIntyre, who wrote the movie adaptations of a couple of Star Trek movies that I would review many years later.
At any rate, that’s a couple of real life questions where there’s a meaningful pause when someone asks them to me.
Because, well, YES!
Actually, what I’ve done is to set up StatCounter as a user on my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, so it can pick up search strings in an unencrypted state. And yes, this costs me a small chunk of change; it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth for most people.