Tuesday, August 05, 2003

live weblog update

I am talking now live on the telphone to Rob "Babycakes" Clark, occasional Special Guest participant in this weblog. He does not believe me that he can use Google in order to find a weblog about Morrissey (his biological father). He says that he does not have Google on his machine. I note that Google is in fact a website, that it can be accessed by typing in www.google.com. He seems very skeptical about my claims regarding Google. He says that he thinks that I am, once again, pulling his leg, and that in order to get Google on his machine he is going to have to engage in some kind of lengthy download that by the time it's done will have filled his hard drive with nasty peripheral-melting viruses. He is also sure that the Google download will somehow get a hold of his credit card information, and before you know it, he will be the victim of all kinds of identity theft and then be stalked and beaten by four blonde guys from Utah in Punch-Drunk Love all over again.

"You've done this before," he asks suspiciously about Google, "you've used this thing on the web to search for other things that are also the web."
"Yes," I reply. "I've done it several times during this phone conversation alone."
"But never before?" Rob asks.
"Yes, I've done it before."
"Name one time you've done it before."
"To find your wife's picture to upload to my weblog this morning."
"But what about to search for other weblogs?"
"Well, I've googled myself, and my weblog is the third thing that comes up."
"What are the first two things?"
"My home page, and then the Ben & Jerry's flavors on my website."

Rob then changes the subject and announces that he wants to sponsor Special Weblog Contest #2, where the contest is to figure out, in six-degrees-of-separation style, if it takes more clicks to get from my weblog to the Fox News Corporation home page or to get to the Al-Jazeera home page.

"If I put in links to them in this entry," I reply, "it would be one degree of separation to each. But, alas, I'm too lazy to do that."

Later, I promised Rob that I would actually put in a link to the Google website from this blog entry (which, I did, above), so that he wouldn't have to remember my instructions and type out the address himself.

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