TODAY’S RECIPIENT OF THE AWESOME TROPHY:

My wife, who excels at Excel, was just showing me how to use a VLOOKUP table (”so that’s what they’re calling it these days, nyuk nyuk”). Excel spreadsheets on Friday nights: it’s true that nobody parties like newlyweds party.

Needing data to use in my fake spreadsheet, I went and grabbed some of my favorite data, the visitor stats for jimski.net. I hadn’t looked at my logs in quite some time, and I noticed that one of the sites that was linking to me was a site called the HomewithGod Christian Directory.

Obviously, that doesn’t make any sense. In a directory with categories like “Pastoral,” “Devotional,” and “Apologetics,” there is no room for a site that occasionally compares the Pope to a gremlin.

So what was the deal? Well, a little more searching revealed that my site wasn’t linked in the directory at all; HomewithGod offers “free Christian web hosting,” and someone had put up a personal site that linked to me.

Here’s the thing, as briefly as possible: many years ago when I was researching link trading for a search engine marketing company, I used to shake the web’s crazy tree and have all kinds of kooky crazies fall out. For my own amusement, I used to maintain a page on my web site cataloguing the most deeply weird links I came across, most of them inevitably sort of… well, I hesitate to say “adult in nature” when I could just say “pervy with scurvy.” People with sneezing girl fetishes. People who advocated pleasuring yourself with Keds sneakers. Pages of pictures of just people’s tongues. Nude photos doctored to make the ladies look like Klingons. That sort of thing. I’d find these sites while looking for innocuous things, I’d say, “I have to share this with others,” and on my page would go a link and some snarky commentary.

I never took this page down, but I stopped updating it about six years ago; as I wrote at the time, it got to the point where finding weirdos online wasn’t so much like shooting fish in a barrel as it was like shooting liquid in the ocean. But even after six years, people still find this old page while desperately, desperately looking for dolphin sex, and people trying to make money with porn links still link to it. I bet at least two thirds of the people visiting my site are people coming to this page, quickly realizing it isn’t what they need–”Hey, there’s not a single picture of the New Kids on the Block wrestling in pudding on this page at all!”– and moving on.
And that’s the thing. Some guy used some of his space on the Christian Web Hosting site and linked to a big ol’ buncha porn, and my weirdo-chiding site just happened to be one of the links. All of these elements came together this evening so that I could look at my logs and see

30 hits from http://our.homewithgod.com/pervsnamehere/zooporn/index.html

which obviously is the most awful, wonderful, terrible, fantastic thing of the week. And I saw Snakes on a Plane this week.