what we're up against

The site meter I use on this blog gives me some details about my visitors. What city and country they're in. What time of day they visit. How many pages they read. Sometimes, they link from another blog that has me on the blogroll. Sometimes, the details are generic (AOL North America).

I often chuckle at the silly searches people do that land them here. By typing in strange combinations of words in Yahoo or Google, they are directed to sanguinary blue because one or more of the hundreds of posts I've written happen to contain one or more of the words they're looking for.

Sometimes, it makes sense. All the hits received after I mentioned Blake Lewis wiping away LaKisha Jones's tears on American Idol. And for some reason, the cute Randy Glasbergen cartoon about a messy desk that gets a lot of attention.

But today, someone visited by way of a Google search for "poems making fun of overweight people." Although it doesn't surprise me that they'd end up here because every one of those words can readily be found here, it's disheartening that the context is completely out of whack. While I talk about poems and fun and overweight and people, I would never include "poems making fun of overweight people," unless I was crazily ranting a rebuttal.

And while it was sad to know that people out there are actually doing research online to find information that might embolden their fat hatred, it came as a complete stunner that the origin of this search was University Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri. How frustrating it is to know that someone who theoretically cares for human beings could even think of such a thing. It drives home the ongoing problem of anyone with a BMI over 24.9 getting unprejudiced medical attention.

Of course, I don't know the true reason this phrase was searched, or if the person searching it was an employee of the hospital, or if, when they got to my blog, they may have been even moderately enlightened to the concept of HAES. But it's hard to imagine a beneficial use of this particular search -- especially from this particular location.