THE MATRIX

Hi! Here is a funny thing:

A few months ago we put a little sidebar on the right side of this blog because I was noticing that our blog readership was waning, which made me become a bit more interested in our readership demographics in general (I'm serious). Since the only variable I know how to quanitify with any sort of application is location, I put one of those neat little "Flag Counter" sidebars up to see where in the world we were the most popular, and what potential far-off places we could try convince the board of directors to let us tour to, now that we had hard data proving where in the world we were a popular and relevant band. For the first few months that the Flag Counter has been here, I was proud to imagine that our music and jocular-yet-earnest vibe was tracing a path throughout the globe. Currently, the denizens of 153 have visited our humble website (out of 203 total on earth), which warmed our hearts with visions of imperialism and manifest destiny. Until I started to closely examine another of those handy widgets in our sidebar, and got a clearer view of what was actually going on.

Could it really be that people in Myanmar (Formerly Burma, 1 view), Bhutan (1 view), Guam (Oceanic unincorporated territory of the United States, 2 view), and the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (6 view) were really hip enough to have heard of our little band? The answer I'd soon realize, would yield shocking and hilarious results.

If you will direct your attention just below the Flag Counter widget, you'll notice something called the Feedjit Live Traffic Feed. This is an interesting little device that shows in real time who is visiting your website. It lists what country the person is from, how they arrived at your website, and where they went afterwards. It soon became clear where these rogue visitors were coming from, how they wound up on Lookingforgold.

For instance, the most recent visitor is tracked as follows:

Zagreb, Grad Zagreb arrived from terapija.net on "Looking For Gold".

"Terapija.net" appears to be some kind of Croatian music review site, and their review of our last record (which they gave a 6 our out of 10 and called "acid punk" - I guess something gets lost in the translation, or does it?) was the jumpoff for this person to arrive on our blog, which was linked in the review. Fair enough, it's a music website link, from a place we've played a few times.

Similarly, a few entries below turns up:

United States arrived from google.com on "Looking For Gold" by searching for Fucked up.

We can safely assuming that some kid in the US was just looking for our website on google. But this basically explains the mystery. When we first started the band, we didn't have any sort of online representation. We've gone from nothing, to having several fake myspace pages, a few facebook fan sites, a bunch of documentation on all the labels we've been on, and this blog. We always used to joke that we chose or band name in a calculated attempt to change language - to claim the most basic and useful curse adjective as our own. Seeing how popular things like amazons Kindle are for reading, and how much language bends and changes on sites like Twitter and on texts, it's safe to say that almost all of the development of language in our culture is taking place online. Seven or eight years ago, if you typed "Fucked Up" into google, I don't even want to tell you what would pop up. Slowly as we got more press and solidified our online presence, you'd start to see articles relating to our band on like the 8th page. Now if you type "Fucked Up" into google, arguably the place online most representative of the collective definition of term and relevance, 8 out of 10 of the top things are about our band.

Now, this isn't the important or funny part. If you type in "fucked", you STILL get a bunch of hits about us, mixed in with what it would otherwise be safe to assume such a search would turn up. Which leads us back to our Feedjit log. Check out this entry:

Copiap, Atacama arrived from google.cl on "Looking For Gold" by searching for fucked.

I don't have any idea where Copiap Atacama is, or even what part of that name describes which country it is. All I know is that that person wasn't looking for our band when they typed "Fucked" into google.cl. They were looking for porn! So thats why we've had so many hits from these far off regions - they were looking for porn and wound up here. Someone from Lahore did the same thing, a few minutes later:

Lahore, Punjab arrived from google.com.pk on "Looking For Gold" by searching for fucked.

According to google, WE have a greater claim to "Fucked" than porn does. And the internet is like 80% porn or whatever the stat is? Pretty funny. It's hard to imagine now how people can still get uptight about our name. We're doing more to redefine and even clean up language by USING swear words than those types of people are by getting upset about it. Not that it's even an issue, but it's still funny. Here are some more funny tracker entries I found:

New York arrived from google.com on "Looking For Gold: April 2008" by searching for anderson hill bus no. 12.
Not sure what this one means, but I'm gonna try and take that bus to see how fucked up it is.

Newbury Park, California arrived from images.search.yahoo.com on "Looking For Gold: November 2006" by searching for united states.

Davis, California arrived from images.search.yahoo.com on "Looking For Gold: November 2006" by searching for united states.
This one I like because it gives us a new mandate. Not only are we gonna reclaim "Fucked", it looks like one day it might also be possible for us to pirate and take over "UNITED STATES". Insult to injury, cause we're from Canada.

Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg arrived from google.de on "Looking For Gold" by searching for gay klips blogspots.com.

Bremen arrived from google.de on "Looking For Gold" by searching for fucked as.
Funny pair of Germanic extreme porn mispellings.

Bakersfield, California arrived from google.com on "Looking For Gold: May 2009" by searching for looking for gold and found asbestos.
Would be a bummer.

Udaipur, Rajasthan arrived from google.co.in on "Looking For Gold" by searching for driver fuck his lady sleeping client free sute movies.

Toronto, Ontario arrived from google.ca on "Looking For Gold: XMAS TIMES" by searching for arts ubc ca uploads media adult mom fucking son.
Very specific searches yields dissapointing results.

WE ARE WATCHING YOU