Soooo…. I haven’t updated this blog in just under twelve months.. ‘Why?’ I pretend to hear you ask. Well, mainly because I lost my mojo. (If you were born after 1974 – look it up…).

I felt like this blog didn’t really have a direction or purpose. It just felt uncomfortably like I had forced my way into your life and was droning on like the most boring guest at a dinner party about my opinions and thoughts without ever having the decency to ask you if you were interested in what I was saying. (And let’s be honest, there’s probably only around three of you who read this regularly – so it wasn’t even a dinner party. I was essentially just ruining a nice game of scrabble).

So I decided to stop. And I wouldn’t start until I came up with a plan.

Last week I had inspiration… After watching Julie & Julia, I realized that a bunch of the more well-known blogs/books have an ‘event’ theme. You know, the kind where (as in the movie) the author cooks a different recipe every day for a year or (as per the book I’m currently reading) the author decides to live literally by the word of the Bible for a year.

The problem is the only thing I’m really interested in doing over the course of a year is paying another 1/30th of my house off. But it’s more than that – these authors are using another source to drive their narrative. And occassionally, that narrative hits a collective nerve and they get more than three people reading their blog. (Don’t misunderstand me – I think you three are wonderful, wonderful people. I just think we should possibly talk about things other than Star Trek and Mathemagic.)

So I started to look at other blog communities to see what there was out there that could inspire me. I started reading about ‘getting hits’ and ‘finding the right tags’ and so on. I was in some seriously geeky internet soup. And then, while reading a posting on a newsgroup, I had a moment of clarity;

dmobile215 said “Well we all that that traffic problem, its your tags, or keywords I should say you got to make it simple. not difficult for people to find your articles there are millions of people surfing everyday and night like myself you just have to make it easy.. reading articles on the best keywords is a good idea.”

…This is precisely why dmobile215 gets invited to a lot of dinner parties (and dmobile’s 1 – 214 just sit at home in their Mother’s basement). Aside from the fact that dmobile215 has clearly never heard of the word ‘grammar’, he/she/it speaks the Truth. People find your site by having it presented in Google when they search certain keywords. So if I find the top 3 words each time I blog – I must be writing about things that people want to hear about, right? Which means I have a permanent source of inspiration – and I drive traffic to my site (hopefully with your help).

This will obviously lead to huge readership (let’s say seven or eight people) – which will clearly lead to a book deal – which should ultimately lead to a movie deal. At this point I will obviously redistribute my vast wealth throughout the three people who were my original readers. (Please note – the last bit is a lie. Not going to happen).

Ladies & Gentleman (And whatever the third one of you is)… I give you ‘Project: Three Little Words‘.

Here are the rules;

1. When I’m terribly bored, I will use the ‘Google Trends‘ tool to find out what people are searching for most on Google.
2. I will use a date sometime between the date I’m writing, and the last update, as my reference point. This allows me to avoid terribly dull or terribly sad subjects.
3. I will pick the top three words for the selected dates (and then probably have to find out exactly what they mean) then write some irrelevant nonsense about them.
4. If the top two words are ever ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Mathemagic’ I will give everyone who reads this blog a brand new car.
5. Rule 4 is also a lie.

So, naturally, the first thing to do with Project: Three Little Words is decide who is going to play me in the movie… I know, I know – this may seem premature, but I hate it when they get someone in a movie that looks nothing like the person they are supposed to be. So, in lieu of auditions at some indeterminate point in the future, I visited MyHeritage.com to use their celebrity look-a-like thingy.

Below are the results…

http://www.myheritage.com/collage

…Yup. The celebrity that looks most like me is K. D. Lang.

Awesome.

Oh, and apparently I have a touch of Catherine Deneuve about me as well. There is some upside in that Colin Farrell appears as a look-a-like. But you’ll notice there is a 64% match. Essentially, it’s telling me that one of my arms and both of my legs look exactly like Colin Farrell.

Oh, and then there’s Carson Daly. Unfortunately, I already have more people reading this blog than watch his show. (Although think how disappointed he’s going to be when he gets ME as his celebrity look-a-like..)

So that was, unfortunately, not the life-affirming exercise I thought it would be. Let’s move on…

The three ‘hot trends’ in Google for the day I selected (Feb 22nd 2010) are;

1. Lincoln Tunnel.

2. Air Car.

3. Nastia Liukin

Hm.

I’m beginning to think this may not be such a great idea.

…First of all I need to research Nastia Liukin, which I figure is either a disease or a character in the next Harry Potter movie. Apparently she is, in fact, a gymnast. She is also dating Evan Lysacek. (Who is a figure skater). Unfortunately, I’m not a particularly big fan of gymnastics. Any sport where you get points for not falling over doesn’t really appeal to me. Really the whole thing consists of you putting yourself in a situation where you are extremely likely to fall over, and then not doing that. It’s all a bit anticlimactic.

Speaking of anticlimactic – the Lincoln Tunnel is reported by Google because it was ‘partially reopened’ today. I’m not sure how you ‘partially reopen’ a tunnel. Do they only let you in and not back out? Of course that leads me neatly onto the ‘Air Car’.

The Air Car appears to be a revolution in automobile engineering. It seats 3 and you steer it with a joystick. Yes – a joystick. Bear with me for the next bit – I’m not making it up… The driver steps in through the windshield, and the passengers – through the rear window.

No, really.

…And it looks like this;

Really. At every designer’s office there should be someone who is paid to take a step back – look at the final design – and say ‘Have you actually talked to anyone other than your Mother about this?’

So that’s the first round of Project: Three Little Words. And I think I enjoyed it. I guess it felt somewhat like we all learned something. You learned what an Air Car was – and I learned that I mostly look like a Canadian lady who’s nine years older than me.

…I’m so glad I’m back…