Red Recondite

Spotted at this Burger King at Northland Dr and Cannonsburg Rd on Sunday, April 19th:

Also spotted at this Independent Bank the same day, but I didn’t take a picture.

Something strange is happening.

The following pictures document what I found in my sink’s garbage disposal just minutes ago.  I am not kidding.

As near as I can tell, this is what you get when you throw cantalope seeds down the drain, but you forget to turn the garbage disposal on.

Say hello to Helen.

She is perched outside of the chicken pen.  She is blind.

Last weekend, the Michigan weather had warmed up considerably (considerably for Michigan), and it was above freezing.

As the sun rose in the sky, my father opened the large door to the chicken pen.  The chickens gradually wandered out, and mingled about outside for the afternoon.  They enjoy wandering about the yard.  Surprisingly, the cats don’t bother them at all.

As afternoon darkened to evening, my father herded them back into the pen.  Alas, one of the chicken’s poked its head outside for another second, and was subsequently rewarded by having its head squished quite thoroughly as my father swung the large door shut.

For reasons that remain unclear, my mother took it upon herself to care for this chicken.  She set up a small box in the basement for it to stay in, and fed it milk.  As the days went by, she grew more attached to it, and even gave it a name: Helen.

Alas, Helen cannot see, and is a rather daft.  She responds to sounds and touch, but primarily spends her time standing in one spot, turning around in circles.  She will not eat for herself, and my mother must feed her milk.

As you can see, Helen isn’t looking so well.  One of her eyes is missing, and one is very cloudy.  Her crown is blackened and flaccid.

Interesting.

A ‘movie fan’ posted a comment to my Awesome Max Payne Review.  I was suspicious, because, let’s be honest here, this blog isn’t exactly high-caliber reading material, despite the eloquence of that particular review.

I searched for his comment in good ol’ google, and it looks like the same text, “i suspect the storyline for Max Payne is a lot more exciting when it’s happening in the form of a video game…“, has been posted everywhere else, with minor variations.

Looking at movie fan’s link, Kingdom of God Media, and the typical motivation for blog spam simply isn’t there: there is no money to be made.

1. There are no ads.
2. He has a donate link, but I have difficulty imagining that gets much action.
3. He does link to an Amazon.com page selling a book he wrote, but that’s only on his other blog, Books By Patrick.

And, true to its tag line, “The Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Revealed Through Movies, Music and Television”, it does interpret movies, music, and television with a religious frame, but not a ‘convert the heathens’ frame.

So, why?  Why, Mr. Patrick Roberts, why do you post the same comment everywhere?  It is not a bad comment, sure, but what do you have to gain from it?

By process of elimination, or perhaps by process of lack of imagination, I’m only left with ‘self promotion’.  At the very bottom of his blog, there are several links to ‘blogtoplist’, ‘blogtoparea’, and other such blog-ranking web sites.  By posting the same comment to multiple web sites, he is probably google-bombing his blog to a higher ranking.

And, because of the very minor variations in the comment, and the fact that my anti-spam filter did not flag it, I am under the assumption that he went to each site and posted the comments himself, without the aid of a spam bot.

So, I wondered how he found my eloquent review.  While my review is perhaps the lowest ranked item in a standard Google Search, it is in the first few dozen hits for Google Blog Search.