Who was that man? I'd like to shake his hand.

When trying to shore up the blog from the ongoing Blogspot server problems (exact quote from the current post on their status page: "the affected blogs are no longer entirely inaccessible.") I had a quick look at my search hits.

With all of this hoo-ha there were still two in the last day-ish, and they are amazing.

The first: "who wrote the book of yob"

This one zeroed in on my post about The Comic Strip episode called "The Yob." So on the surface, a sensible hit. The thing is this, as soon as I see the thing, I get "Who Wrote the Book of Love" stuck in my head. So I have that going on. Because I have the song stuck in my head, I start to get curious. Is there a "Book of Yob?"

So I do the search - sure enough, I am the second hit in the main results, and half of the others are references to text where "yob" and "wrote the book" are sort of close (just like mine). The post that pulls ahead of me as number one (at the moment - I'm betting that this post will cruise me into first place) is a review in the London Review of Books of an autobiography of a British Footballer named Keane (he seems to have reached the level of fame where you only need one name). I love skimming quickie autobiographies of celebrities that I've never heard of, because it's fun to try to work out what ghastly deeds they are accused of, want to set the record straight on, and yet don't even want to mention specifically in their book because they are "taking the high road." This looks like it might be one of them. It is now on my "to get" list in the "99 cents/pence and under" column.

But that's not the best one. Above the main hits, Google offers product searches. Top hit for "who wrote the book of yob" is the new Ray Davies album.

Google also suggests that I might be looking for information on the Book of Job. Which makes these results even more thrilling.

The second Google search was for "humorous ditty for sixtieth birthday." Every once in a while I'm stuck in a restaurant where somebody is having a fiftieth or sixtieth birthday, and someone will stand up and read some horrid poem about how the guest of honor is getting older and more decrepit, will die soon and be eaten by vultures and worms, but first their brains will stop working and their genitalia will fall off. (Strangely, those songs and poems don't happen for eightieth and ninetieth birthday celebrations.) They found their way to me (I'm the fourth hit) because I put this post up a while ago.

Perhaps the new Ray Davies album will be of interest here as well.