Imperceptible Sally

Early this year I wrote about the most popular search terms that lead people to Blam’s Blog and shortly thereafter shared some of the weirder ones. It’s time to share again.

Like I said then, I started checking my Stats page randomly throughout the day after getting consistent chuckles from the kind of off-the-wall phrases that you only see in the Stats page’s Traffic Sources section fleetingly, usually in the “Now” view, by dint of their very strangeness; things get more normal in the “Daily” view as a search term will have to be entered multiple times to rank as one of the ten strings logged there at any given moment, and by the time we’re up to “Weekly” it’s such comparitively mundane stuff as the Muppets or Superman covers or the surprisingly popular Geoff Peterson.

I find that the funniest searches tend to fall into at least one of three categories: very specific; almost impossibly broad; and totally bizarre in juxtaposition. The phrase used for this post’s title is the first and third of those. What in the world could that be? My own search for “Imperceptible Sally” yields no clues. It doesn’t hit on the name of a blog, a book or TV or movie title, or even a band name — although it would be a great band name. The graphic that it picks up from this blog appears in my post “Foyer, Guns, and Honeys” (which looks at its predecessor in St. John’s experimental line of Picture Novels, It Rhymes with Lust) and “Sally” is elsewhere on the page in my list of labels. [Note: The cover is no longer in that post and my list of labels is no longer on every page of the blog.] Of course now that string appears on the Web, atop this post — for apparently the first time, as Googling it with quotes around the words returns nothing — without being of any help. Them’s the breaks.


Cover to the 1950 St. John paperback The Case of the Winking Buddha,
which alas does not feature a heroine known as Imperceptible
Sally, cadged from the Heritage Auctions website.

Here are 15 more random head-scratchers. You can suss out a rationale for some of them, sure; when I worked in a comics shop, people would stop by not infrequently looking for an image of, say, Batman holding a piece of paper. Most of them, however, are just so bizarrely focused or cast so bizarrely wide a net.

1970s foreign children

batman holding a piece of paper

dc comics robin praying

restrain of successful

interested in life

wolverine hugh jackman in pajamas

stop overthinking

mullet bingo card

single line diagram of power line distribution with legends

what color ink is romantic for a letter

nostalgia publications stockings

rich lady finger illustration

doberman dogs named pepper

books over 300 pages

probably bad news

I really love that last one and actually wish that I hadn’t found out that it was the name of a category on a blog devoted to classic “fails”.


Related: Search Me • In Translation • Joker Lice