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This is one of those rare off-topic posts. I’m boggled by something that defies all rational comprehension. I guess since this blog deals with the effects of the irrational among us, it is somewhat on-topic.

I was poring over some search engine data, trying to figure out what is luring people to this site. It’s never what I think it is. I write some great articles, and they’re almost completely ignored. Then I write some stupid easy post that takes me five whole minutes and has no real social value, and that’s what everybody comes for.

I might write more later about some of the other weird stuff in that data. Today I’d like to focus on just one weird thing. Over the last month, I have received visits from 16 different people. These are the search terms they used to find my blog:

• hey shirley this is squirrely
• hey shirley this is squirrely lyrics
• hey shirley this is squirrely mp3
• Hey Shirley (This Is Squirrely) mp3
• hey shirley this is squirrely do you have your ears on
• squirrely and shirley cb radio mp3
• cb radio songs hey shirley this is squirrely
• mp3 downloads shirley and squirrely
• Shirley Squirrely and Melvin
• SHIRLEY,SQUIRRELY,AND MELVIN MUSIC TO DOWNLOAD

To those 16 people, and those who follow, I have one question:

Most art can be categorized into one of four groups:

• Good
• Bad
• So bad it’s good
• So bad it’s still bad

Let me give you some examples:

I only titled this post the way I did, because “Fire Maidens from Shirley and Squirrely” doesn’t have the same recognition factor. Most people haven’t seen Fire Maidens from Outer Space. Those who have probably saw it on MST3K. Wimp! Pussy! You have no claim to the title “Have seen the worst movie of all time” until you have seen it the way it was meant to be seen: completely unadorned by funny commentary. You must watch it straight! Only then (if you survive) can you truly understand what bad is. Only then can you comprehend what it must be like to be incarcerated at Gitmo.

But if Fire Maidens isn’t available, you can always listen to Shirley and Squirrely.

The original CB radio song that I featured in earlier posts is So Bad It’s Bad, but even that is not as bad as their “live” album. You could make a case that the CB song has a certain goofy charm that elevates it into the So Bad It’s Good category. I would disagree with you, but I could at least recognize the elements within the song that almost make it listenable. The live album has no such charm.

Nonetheless, It took me a while to find these mp3s. I’m not going to waste all that effort just because they’re worse than I thought. I had to suffer through these things, so you do too. I’ll spare you the worst of it, though. The songs that follow are the actually the “best” ones on the album.

Let’s start with “Blue Suede Shoes”. I’ve heard some bad Elvis impersonators before, and this rivals the worst of them.

Next, let’s cue up “The Gambler”. What’s weird about this one is they bring in a normal guy to sing a mediocre version of the Kenny Rogers song, and the squirrels only provide high-pitched backup and sound effects. Listen for the squirrel guzzling the booze and taking a long drag on a cigarette.

That last song typifies what’s wrong with this album. They seem to have forgotten that they’re making a novelty record. They’ve gotten it into their heads that they’re making real music here. This is the sort of project that jumps the shark as soon as they start taking themselves too seriously.

Now that the squirrels have destroyed Elvis Presley and Kenny Rogers, let’s give them a chance to ruin the Beatles:

Clearly, Mark David Chapman shot the wrong singer.

Let’s finish with “Mercedes Benz”:

Roll, Janis, roll!!

The above is a funny diagram from the blog of Jessica Hagy. That’s her whole schtick. The entire blog is Venn diagrams and x-y graphs scribbled onto index cards. Some of them are pretty funny.

You ought to read the comments people left on that post. It’s a replay in microcosm of all of the comments people have left on my Duggar articles.

It’s some kind of bizarre coincidence that the first time I encounter her blog the diagram featured that day is of the Duggars! It’s also kind of fitting. It gives me a way to close off that chapter in this blog’s history.

Unlike some of you, I moved beyond the Duggars a long time ago. For me, they were just brief stop on this expedition through Fundieland. They were a strange specimen to tag and release. This blog never was about the Duggars, at least no more than it’s about Shirley and Squirrely. Little did I know that the Duggars would be responsible for about a quarter of my traffic and half of my comments. There have been very few days when they weren’t occupying one of the spots in the Recent Comments list. They give new visitors a distorted view of what this blog is about.

The time has come. The time is now. Jim Bob Duggar, will you please go now!

Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, because he was sick of him. That’s all people identified him with. At one point Conan Doyle even forbade people to mention Holmes’ name in his presence.

I had been planning for a while to shut down the Duggar threads on August 7th. When I saw the above diagram, I thought that would be a great opportunity to shut it down now. I ultimately decided to stick with the original plan. You have one week to say your goodbyes.

The Amazing Meeting 6 is now less than two weeks away. Is anyone out there planning to attend? Speak up here! Is anybody interested in getting together for a BoF meetup at some point during that weekend? My time there is limited to Thursday night through Saturday night. I won’t be attending any of the optional shows, so my evenings will be open. Maybe if there are other blog groups that are getting together, we can merge our parties into a group of four!

Postings were light last week and will probably be light again this week, because I have job issues to deal with. Doesn’t leave much time for blogging. I’ll try to squeak an article or two in.

Another thing that doesn’t leave much time for blogging is following a link on another blog and ending up at a hilarious web site and spending the next two hours reading all of the back posts. I am referring to Monkey Fluids, which just killed two hours of my evening. Two hours which I have no regrets over.

The site is brilliant! I just added it to my RSS reader. You must do the same. What the guy does is take illustrations from old kids’ magazines and recaptions them. To whet your appetite, here are five of my favorites.

This blog is getting a few more comments these days than it used to. Overall, the quality of the comments has been quite good, and the exchanges have been mostly civil. However, things have bordered on rudeness a few times, so I thought I should come up with a formal comment policy.

I’m hoping that we don’t need a set of strict laws. Maybe these few guidelines will be sufficient:

• No spamming. (The only real violators of this rule are spambots.)
• No gobs o’ links. The spam filter automatically holds for review any comment that contains more than one link. If you aren’t a spammer, I will probably approve your comment within 12 hours. However, your bunch o’ links should be somehow contributing to the discussion. For example, one time, a creationist didn’t like one of my posts, so he tried to post a comment. His comment consisted mostly of single sentences followed by a link, such as “See how Darwinists are wrong: [then a link to Answers in Genesis]”. It was about eight links. It contributed nothing to the discussion, so I didn’t approve it. (I did, however, send him an email explaining why.)
• If you make a factual statement (vs. an opinion) that contradicts common knowledge, back it up. If you are challenged on a statement (and I agree with the challenge), you will not be allowed to make new comments until you support the challenged claims. Example of common knowledge: Evolution is a fact. Example of a statement that contradicts common knowledge: The Bible is the inerrant word of God (This is a factual claim, but it fails on two counts: (1) There is no evidence that a God exists, and (2) No evidence that the Bible contains God’s word.).
• No quote mining. Quoting something once is fine, but quoting many things or posting a series of comments with quotes does not add to the discussion. If you can’t use your own words, then you obviously have nothing to say.

I might add to this as I think of other things, but I’m hoping that you folks don’t give me any reasons to add much more. The main thing I want to do is maintain the comments as a quasi-pleasant place to be. If somebody is making it unpleasant, that will have to be fixed.

I was checking StumbleUpon to see what people were saying about some of my articles that they were flagging. Most comments were positive, which I guess you’d expect if people are flagging it as a favorite. Some people leave negative comments. That’s fine, too. I’m not trying to please everyone, just the people in my target audience. I would prefer it if people came here to leave their negative comments, so I could respond, but I guess that’s not the way StumbleUpon works.

What’s funny is the occasional comment that is so extremely negative that I have a hard time imagining that somebody could really have such a distorted reaction. Do some people really go through life having such violent reactions to things they see? Apparently so. I guess these are the sorts of people who insist on censoring everything they disagree with.

A case in point is the reaction by a woman calling herself “ddoll”. Specifically, she was reacting to my article about the AIG Research Paper Winner, but she seems to be directing her comments to the site as a whole. (The StumbleUpon page of comments is here.)

And now for your enjoyment, here is ddoll’s review of the Bay of Fundie:

This is a hate site. Pure and simple. Why is it bothering this guy so much that Creationists believe what THEY want to believe and he can believe what HE wants to believe? There is no scientific proof either way on this theory and that is why both sides are still freely able to be taught. GET THE @#$% OVER IT ALREADY! Can’t believe this moron dedicates a whole site to mean-spirited slams against a certain group of people for their beliefs. How do people go through life being so volatile against anything that differs from their belief system? The world does not revolve around him because he’s atheist. Live and let live.

Yes, ddoll, how does someone go through life being so volatile against anything that differs from her belief system?

If any of you are experiencing technical issues with this website, please leave a comment on this post.

I just tested this site on a Windows 2000 machine with Internet Explorer 6, and none of the media shows up. I used to have access to a different Win2000/IE 6 machine, and everything showed up fine.

This site complies with the W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard. Your best bet is to use a browser that’s actually standards compliant, such as Firefox. I know some of you read this site at work (maybe not such a good idea!), so you don’t have control over which browser is on your machine. If there’s something obvious I can fix, I’ll do so, but I’m not going to break the site for the people who follow the rules just so I can accommodate Microsoft.

You’ll notice a link to the Atheist Blogroll in the sidebar. Most sites that have this will list at least some of the blogs from that blogroll in their sidebar. I don’t, because that forces your browser to run off to a different server to fetch stuff. That slows down page loading times. The code for that also uses javascript. I try to use as little javascript on this site as possible.

A bunch of blogs are listing the entire Atheist Blogroll in a post. This helps the listed sites with their search engine rankings and Technorati authority. I thought I would help out here as well. Herewith is the entire list. Scan through it and see if any of the titles sound interesting and give them a look.