My two new obsessions

OBSESSION ONE: CSI

Last week while I was confined to my couch in my lipo girdle like some drag queen on house arrest, I stumbled on this fabulous show that turns grisly murder investigations and lurid pre-murder backstories into a spectator sport that’s fun—and educational!—for the whole family. I loved it so much I put all three channel options (CBS and the two channels that show reruns) at the top (well, right under Queer Eye) of my TiVo Season Pass list. And now, every night when I get home, I race to the TV to cram in at least one episode before I go to bed. Which is such a productive use of my time.

True to the television rule that franchising a popular show is better than coming up with new ones, there are currently three CSI siblings on the air right now: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original, which takes place in Las Vegas), CSI: Miami (which features the perpetually weird-talking David Caruso) and CSI: New York. The best by far is the Las Vegas version, mostly because it features the boy-next-door hunky George Eads as wholesome, earnest CSI rookie Nick Stokes. I have yet to see Nick take his shirt off on the show, but a quick visit to Google found me exactly what I was looking for. Google also produced a second helpful site that contains a number of visual “reasons of why” George is such a hottie.

As an added bonus, CSI seems to be a veritable breeding ground for actors who are about to make it big. In one night alone this week, I saw two separate reruns that featured none other than Bree Van De Camp and her philandering husband (as the killers, no less)—only months before they met each other (in prison?) and moved to Wisteria Lane.

But for all its severed-hand-in-a-microwave fun, CSI does have some bad habits. One is an addiction to painfully lengthy montages where we see lab technicians suspending candy wrappers in smoke-filled fishbowls to check for fingerprints or dicing up cadaver livers, putting them in a blender and pipetting the resulting goo into test tubes that go into a mysterious machine that spits out a sheet of paper with a Magical Piece of Missing Information (I was eating chili the night they showed that montage). The show could clearly use this airtime better by showing Nick Stokes going to the bathroom.

The second bad habit is the following scene, which plays out at least 10 different ways in each episode:

Lab technician (who used to be on that one sitcom with that one girl who had really big boobs): I’ve identified the mysterious substance you found on the body/at the murder scene. It’s polyfartypoopoochloride.

CSI person (who just came from the morgue and is dressed in body-hugging couture): Aha—sugar-free hair spray! That means the killer likes puppies.

Lab technician: I know. So I cross-referenced the handy wallet card I carry that lists the names and addresses of everyone in Budapest who drives a Volvo with our computer database of everyone who shopped at Sears the night that I played an extra in the coffee shop on “Friends” and look who I found:

(shows CSI person the computer monitor)

CSI person: Thomas Jefferson!

(cut to interrogation room)

Thomas Jefferson (who clearly has hair and looks unmistakably diabetic): I didn’t tell you I have a puppy the first time you questioned me because you didn’t ask. That doesn’t make me a killer.


OBSESSION TWO: SITEMETER.COM

When I tinkered with the design of this site last week, I had to go to Sitemeter to change the colors of my hit counter (you know, because if the colors didn’t all match, people would laugh). I had originally added the hit counter out of sheer vanity to see if anyone was actually reading my blog, and one of the interesting little Sitemeter bonuses has been a weekly email giving me hour-by-hour breakdowns of the number of hits I get.

But that was NOTHING compared to what I discovered when I poked around the Sitemeter site trying to figure out how to change the colors: Sitemeter keeps track of—and can show me with the click of a mouse—how many people are reading my blog in real time, tells me how much time people spend on certain posts, and—best of all—shows me how they found me, taking me directly to other blogs that have links to mine and directly to search results pages on Google, Yahoo, MSN and a handful of other search engines I’ve never even heard of.

So of course I visit Sitemeter CONSTANTLY, gaping with open-mouthed fascination at the ways people have stumbled on my blog.

And people have found me in some of the weirdest ways—with some of the last search parameters that I would ever guess would put NoFo on the first page of results.

For instance, in the last 24 hours, people have clicked on my site after searching for the following things:

virtual anesthesia maching (sic)
Julie Andrews marriage
porno aubergine rectum
Oprah’s interior designer
jake nofo (I’m blushing!)
picture of Rush Limbaugh house
condom picture jokes
MUFF
best exercise love handles (Jokes’ on you—it’s LIPO!)
short Internet cartoons
photos of naked gay men
women girdle pictures
pizza real estate
Paris Hilton naked (Really!)
red mold pictures
chemical face peels what about them
funny picture with bad breath
and, just moments before I wrote this post: fat boobs

All of which just means I’ll be peppering all my (midget fucking) posts with all kinds of random (sundress! rotisserie chicken!) stuff just so Google will point innocent (nun-slapping) Internet users to my twisted, subversive (moist and delicious) blog. Let the games begin. (Burma shave!)