September 2015 – The Crayon Files

This is the question googlers must ask themselves when they somehow arrive at this blog after googling something seemingly unrelated.

Google, as we know, works in mysterious ways.

This post is inspired by a very funny series, Dear Goldfish, done by my blogosphere friend Fish of Gold, in which she consults her WordPress stats to find out Google searches that resulted in her blog coming up for the searcher. You can see her series here.

It’s always hilarious, and I decided to do the same with my own blog. So here are some of them, posed as questions and proving the adage, “There’s none so queer as folk”. They come complete with my own answers in the style of an agony aunt column (sort of).

Google: gay men in thong and ballet?

Crayon Files: Okay!

Google: Song for cats and crayons?

Crayon Files: Always a place in my heart for that, obviously.

Google: Cat celebrity?

Crayon Files: Well, my cat’s a celebrity—in her lunchtime. Among the proper cat stars, Felix the Cat, incidentally first drawn by an Australian cartoonist, is my all-time favourite, but Garfield and Sylvester are not bad either.

Google: i wish luck to choose the bride you atemnak but?

Crayon Files: How dare you call me an atemnak? Good luck in choosing the bride, anyway.

Google: teeth rotten after drinking coke?

Crayon Files: That’ll do it.

Google: is there a hawaiian snow dome souvenier [sic]?

Crayon Files: Is the Pope Catholic?

Google: freddy’s yorkshire scones?

Crayon Files: Umm, gee, I don’t know. Maybe try the more famous Aussie version, Flo’s pumpkin scones, instead.

Google: do mermaid excess?

Crayon Files: That’s a tricky one.

Google: chaos workplace?

Crayon Files: Unfortunately, it’s the way of modern management.

Google: yadanarbon, the land of the gems?

Crayon Files: Thank you, I learnt a new place name. Yadanarbon is in Mandalay, Myanmar, and is also the name of a famous football club there. The Yadanarbon market is the biggest in Mandalay, with 3000 stalls. For gems, you’d be better to go to the Gem Palace, though.

Google: whiskey sky chicago?

Crayon Files: Yep, whiskey bottles just fall out of the sky there.

Google: One hundred ways of using marmite?

Crayon Files: There are indeed at least a hundred. See my post here for marmite pasta.

I know that, technically, defacing billboards is illegal, but I have to admire culture jammers: those brave souls who climb up high ladders to get at ads for major companies and turn them into a critique of what’s wrong with society.

This sort of thing appeals to the anti-big-business streak in me.

But something that irks me even more than big-company billboards is real estate agents’ billboards with grammar errors.

It’s almost tiresomely predictable that every time you see one, there will be an it’s where there should be an its, a complements where there should be a compliments, or a comprises of where the preposition just shouldn’t be there. And dangling modifiers…don’t get me started!

There’s one such billboard outside a real estate agent in the local village, a few doors away from my house. You can see it at the top of this post.

If you can’t see the grammatical error, you probably won’t want to bother reading this any further.

But for those who are interested, look a little closer, and you see this:

Yes, I was delighted today to see that someone had culture-jammed the billboard. That’ll learn ’em.

Or maybe not. Bet it’s still there, just the same, next time I walk by. And I bet the next board that goes up has the same old errors. I have three words for you, real estate agent billboard writers: get an editor!