You are currently browsing the daily archive for November 10th, 2008.
Over at the Llamas we’ve long had a steady flow of peculiar, not to say seedy, google-search hits. Indeed, now that Steve-O is no longer posting and our regular readership is down to about three people, I would estimate that these searches account for about 95% of our current traffic there.
So far, I’ve had nothing like that here at Port-Swillers Central. In fact, according to WordPress, I only receive a handful of search-term queries among the 150 or so hits that I average per day. However, I have noticed that if TPSAYE can be said to be a target for a particular type of search, it seems to center on, of all things, early North American colonization in general, and the French and Indian War in particular. Just today, for example, I noticed that I got a hit for the search term “names in New France”. By a singular coincidence, I also just happened to read an apropos passage out of Francis Parkman. I pass it on to whoever was looking for this particular piece of information:
On the Great Lakes, in the wastes of the Northwest, on the Mississippi and the plains beyond, we find the roving gentilhomme, chief of a gang of bush-rangers, often his own habitants; sometimes proscribed by the government, sometimes leagued in contraband traffic with its highest officials, a hardy vidette of civilization, tracing unknown streams, piercing unknown forests, trading, fighting, negotiating, and building forts. Again we find him on the shores of Acadia or Maine, surrounded by Indian retainers, a menace and terror to the neighboring English colonies. Saint-Castin, Du Lhut, La Durantaye, La Salle, La Motte-Cadillac, Iberville, Bienville, La Vérendrye, are names that stand conspicuous on the page of half-savage romance that refreshes the hard and practical annals of American colonization. But a more substantial debt is due to their memory. It was they, and such as they, who discovered the Ohio, explored the Mississippi to its mouth, discovered the Rocky Mountains, and founded Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans.
- Parkman, The Old Régime in Canada, France and England in North America Vol. I, p. 1286.
From time to time I’ve felt that in setting up this site, I have, as it were, staked a small claim far out in the Wilderness myself. How amusing that I seem to be drawing this kind of traffic to it.
This morning, the termite inspection guy thought Mrs. R was my daughter.
I’m not quite sure what to make of that.
(***Spot the quote.)
The conversation late this afternoon:
10 Year Old: “Daaaad, I’m really tired. I’ll die if I have to go to swin practice tonight!”
Self: “Well, we’ll make sure you get a nice funeral.”
10 Y.O. – “No, really, Dad! I’ll die! I’m not being a sarcast [sic]!”
Self – “Nor am I. Do you think we’d just get rid of your corpse on the cheap? What kind of parents do you suppose we are? Now go find your towel.”
10 Y.O. – “Humph!”
Recent Comments