Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Hey, Tuesday... come back!

Well, that was fast. While some days move at the same speed as my grandmother drove in her later years, others seem bent on winning their own Indy 500. Or more accurately "Day"tona 500. But the point to these odd metaphors is simply that some days zip.

I have been trying to blog since before breakfast and only now find the chance to do so. So since I've made you all wait, you'd think I'd have the courtesy to provide you with profundity.

But no.

Instead I have a question:

Does anyone know where the phrase "children wash their hands with soap while eating bread" comes from? An alarming (to me) number of people seem to search Google with this phrase and end up here. I love that folks end up here, but I start to wonder just what are they searching for really? I mean when someone gets here by searching "guest book of james fingers farm 2006 company emails" at least I know what they wanted. But this whole "children wash their hands with soap while eating bread" thing is flummoxing.

So... anyone?

7 comments:

Nancy said...

That is the funniest search phrase I've seen yet. Never heard of it. Really you get a lot of people that way?

Greg Pincus said...

I wouldn't say "a lot" but it's the same exact phrase, and I've probably seen it nearly a dozen times (once with the added word "bar" to modify the type of soap). They aren't all the same searcher, either, and my own Googling of the phrase doesn't solve the riddle. Curious.

Anonymous said...

??? MY search got this result: "Your search - "children wash their hands with soap while eating bread" - did not match any
documents."...until i searched Blogs, which got me...guess what.."Hey Tuesday...come back!"...Your place in Google now firmly assured..LOL

Greg Pincus said...

LOL, MC... how self-reflexive! But I had figured that would be the case, as this is the first time those words appear contiguously on my blog. Like you, I have otherwise never found a direct phrase match.

Keep in mind, though, that most searches aren't done with the whole phrase in quotation marks. Sometimes a sub-section will be ("while eating bread" for instance), but usually not even that. Also, folks use waaaaaaaaay more resources than google.com to search the web. I recall during April an email telling me that if you searched MSN with the phrase 'who invented poetry', my blog was first, but that was never the case on Google. And so on.

But algorithms aside, I just want to know if this phrase is one that anyone knows. So far... uh... no.

Kelly said...

I have NO idea, but it's amazing how searching works. Every since I posted the "Monday's Child" poem for Poetry Friday (as a big Trauma for this Thursday girl), I get 10 searches a day for it!

Anonymous said...

With some trepidarion, put the question of source to "Yahoo Answers"...Two answers already: 1) Must be quote from a children's book; 2) Faulty question..impossible to wash hands while holding bread !!
Will keep you advised..LOL

Greg Pincus said...

MC -- if it's from a children's book, I figure the crack readers here will know it. I don't know why you'd think it "must" be, however. Maybe a children's rhyme? Dunno. And remember, they aren't holding the bread. They're eating it. Though why they're eating and washing, I can't say.

Anyway, the point of using the blog here was that someone might know it, not to send curious people off on Net searches. I've already tried that! But the interconnectedness of the Web gives us a far better shot. Besides there's clever folks here, so in time someone will make up an answer if nothing else!