Absurdity, Allegory and China

Reading my ShortStat counter this evening I saw the following at the top of the “Last Keyword” box, which tracks Google searches where this blog site was referenced: “chinese school girls taking off soxks (sic).” Hmmmm. Why me in this one? So, I went to Google to find out how I’d popped up in this distinctive and utterly ineffective inquiry.

Of course the Page One first hit is Wikipedia, an entry on the Raffles Girls’ School in Singapore and something about logos on socks. The second, Nanyang Girls School and more logos and socks. The third is back to Raffles again and the fourth is a YouTube link to “two hot Japanese girls showing off their bodies! 04:23.”

The fifth hit, from boingboing.net, leads to Canadian Catholic girls, 2002: Ontario Catholic Schools doing away with knee socks in favor of tights to combat climbing hemlines and the implied rising occasions of sin. The girls, none too happy about giving up their knee-highs, were “enganging (sic) in civil disobedience” by refusing to sport the officially ordered tights.

I was number six, an entry from February, 2006 about a Tibetan student who’d come to Tianjin and Beijing for 10 days and hadn’t brought any socks, which wasn’t discovered and remedied until day eight. I returned to my ShortStats and looked at the Last Resource box, and the person who’d entered the search had also gone to my original blog post. I assume that whoever generated this uniquely misspelled search was not looking for that, but there it was, linked from the middle of Page One.

You never know where you’ll show up.