Nixta Sinks

I hope that today marks the renaissance of Dr. R's How It Happened. Back to his old form, his post today is marvellous.

Following his link to the 2002 April Fool of pigeon-powered Google, I discovered not only google's calculator, which is a Godsend to anyone trying to convert from seppo cookbooks to pommy goods (half a pound in kilos - genius! Though it fails on "2 car lengths in inches"), but also the "link:" prefix for searching who links to a website.

Interestingly, I'm linked to by some bastards named OnAcne.com, though I can't for the life of me think why (and yes, I've probably thought of all your smart aleck comments already). Turns out that once upon a time I made a little play on the word "comeuppance", writing:

"...like a smelly fish hastily prepared on very old oil, up came my ance all over my nice new shirt and tie and stank the place out."

And the clever bastards decided that where I'd written "ance" I'd really meant to write "acne".

Even more interestingly, the link that google found for me was in fact http://www.onacne.com/ancecure/ which you'll notice references a cure for aNCe and not aCNe.

This bothers me to no small degree because it seems to me that a computer somewhere has taken it upon itself to determine that I can't spell or write (which is fair enough, but for a computer to do that is a bit cheeky) and then provides a link that Google presumably was able to reach that specifically dealt with that. If not, then it must be someone with far too much time on their hands, or else Amazon's Manual Turk (see Dr. R for details) is working far too well... Uhuhuhuhhh.