MIDDLEBURGH

Middleburgh - Endgame Revisited

Recently a colleague shared his perspective on "grudges". The trick, he said, was to cause pain by repeated hurting your "target" without making them realise that it was deliberate: instead of mowing them down with your car, just ease past giving a glancing blow and then reverse over their toes whilst you apologise - all well and good if you have a robust car, but what if your windows keep falling out !!

I mention this because it may make for an enticing search engine snippet and the concept of "revisiting" leads into this post which is basically a follow up to my "All you ever wanted to know about Hong Kong Sports Tourism" series.

One colleague (not the one mentioned above) cruelly pointed out that the series was fatally flawed since I had ommitted the quintessential HK sport of shopping !! Frankly I don't give a rats'!! It kept me amused and provided an opportunity to "tell and sell" to my kids. They can now visit from Europe assured that there are escape options, if and when we reach fraught timeout family moments. Ironically not only did I discover 'new' sporting Opportunities in HK but I also learned of a lot of opportunities in Cork (they say education is a reward unto itself - I sincerely hope so!)

We must all thank cousin Peter for kicking the series of by not coming to visit me when Spurs blew into town.If he had, I may have written an entirely different post - a lucky escape ?. Coincidently a Watford Googler searching for him by name, and no doubt looking for a good dentist, visited this blog a week after I has posted and a couple of days later I tripped over his Facebook profile.His photo shows him grinning broadly whilst holding the Carling Challenge Cup. He must be over the moon at the moment with 3rd pace just ahead of Arsenal!

Next came the "golfing" post. Personally I am not into golf. As I remember, I found it a challenge to complete 9 holes at the Putting Course in Weston- Super-Mare. I must confess I was influenced by fact that The Monkstown Golf Club in Cork is but a par 4 from where my daughter was brought up (and on the balance of probability, I suspect she may be intimately aquainted with the 19th hole).

And then there was the whacking posts which suprisingly proved to be extrodinarily popular. Visitors broadly fell into one of three groups:

• The Hurlers: These dropped in courtesy of google image search by clicking on a hurling image which I had embedded in the post. I never realised that "Hurling" would be so popular and it only goes to show that how effective an image is in drawing in passing trade.
• The Koreans: Very confusing hits from Korea which I think are in same class as worm eating.There were hits related to whacking which is apparently a form of street dancing and Shin whacking. Not quite sure which is the more ludicrous?
• The Wankers: Well how was I to know that Whacking has a sexual meaning!! If I wanted to knock in a nail I might use a hammer and give it a good "whack" and by extention anything which gets "hit" by a "tool" is "whacked", No sexual implications !! and for what its worth I would never user the term "wacking off" if I was referring to one handed pole vaulting or similar - well maybe "tossing off" ??

As it happens this wasn't the only post which pulled in the perves. I thought the "Horsey" post was fairly innocuous however amongst others it attracted traffic from Eygpt and India searching for " sexy women riding horses or donkeys" and the reverse !!

It didn't end there: My last post in the set not only attracted "ballon boy" visitors (which was of topical interest a couple of weeks later) but also visitors from an "iffy" search engine looking for "Zara (Whites) the Dutch porn star who between 1990 and 1992 she appeared in 22 porn movies both in Europe and in the United States and amore recent star (Elena) Hieress. Well how was I to know !!

Of course none of these posts generate as much ongoing traffic as my "Mugabe posts". Every time Zimabwe, Mugabe or Blood Diamonds gets a mention in the news I have a visitor spike, most of whom seem interested in either "Jack" or in the residence on Shan Tong Road, including a suprising number attempting to mask their IP addresses - unlike the visitor from "Goldman Sachs who spent an inordinate length of time reading my post about the Bowen Road Serial Murderer.

I was somewhat disappointed at the initial lack of interest in my ice skating post but as we get closer to Vancouver 2010 and the event promotions kick in, traffic is picking up (I am almost tempted to say "hotting up" but doesn't seem right in context of Winter sports); Apart from some local hits looking for information on ice rinks, local hockey leagues etc I have had some hits from Oakleigh, Melbourne. I would like to think these later may be from some lovelorn girl wondering what had become of AJ and regretting not picking him up off of the ice when she had the chance (Haha - I dream on!!). More recently there has been a recent flury of visits from the US and canada including a searcher asking "where the Chinese National Figure Skating Team trains" - asked and answered!!!

I had no great expectations for the wet works post.The usual lost soul from Middleburgh NY searching on "Middleburgh Fishing" expecting to get tips about where to dip his hook locally but instead discovering Game Fishing Options in the South China Sea. Sort of like stepping into a corner shop for a newspaper and discovering a Wanchai brothel (so to speak). Then there were the local HK visitors searching for the Mandarin Sport Fishing Club - probably members utterly amazed that I had referenced them (and the malware on their site!!) There was also some traffic relating to the Monstown sea Angling Club. (I suspect my post probably doubled their web presence)

Actually I am quite proud of the fact that I have seduced onto my blog residents of Middleburgh NY; Middleburgh Heights Ohio and middleburgh Virginia searching on variants of

• Middleburgh Soccer
• Middleburgh swim Team
• Middleburgh Tournaments
• Middleburgh Tennis
• middleburgh cliffs
• Middleburgh Badminton

I find it subtly subversive and appealing.Almost as satisfying as drawing in "Irish" visitors searching for sporty things "Carrigaline" Apparently Carrigaline is a nexus for sporting activity attracting Googlers including one of the Sull sisters (or a friend) from places as far away as Boston and Australia. The GAA and Badmintom were hot topics as indeed was kickboxing and shooting in Fermoy.

Whilst I didn't get any visitors from either Ireland or US searching for "running" or related sports, unbelivably on the evening of September 14 when the Typhon #8 signal was raised by the HK observatory, I got a visitor from the Cathay Airlines domain searching for "T8 Hash Harriers", presumably someone checking out where the meet was !! Go figure - running at night in the dark in a typhoon. According to the HK Observatory, Typhon Koppu injured 74 people in Hong Kong, four of them seriously.There were 48 reports of fallen trees, of which 11 of them in Hong Kong Island, 19 in Kowloon and 18 in the New Territories. Eight reports of flooding were received and at the Hong Kong International Airport, eight flights were diverted. I sincerely hope that the Cathay air crews get their "psych" checks regularly !!

Posted at 11/30/2009 04:14:00 pm by David Middleburgh   Permalink

|