What is a keyword?  Is it a word that unlocks some magical treasure chest or door to some forbidden room--maybe like "friend" in elvish?  Maybe a keyword is something you stick in something else that keeps it in place.  It is possible that keywords are the only things you have to remember from an otherwise dull and sleep-inducing university or college lecture--or maybe a similar type of sermon.

What do search engine keywords do?  Well, first of all, they make the Internet an uneven playing field because if you have enough money you can place or generate keywords that will give you a higher search rating.  That is totally mean and unfair.  Secondly, you can spend so much time trying to come up with important keywords that the final content of your web pages stink.  Who wants that?  Finally, the results of the searches are totally biased.  Not only is that mean and unfair, as mentioned, but it also makes searching almost useless or at best a total distraction.

Let me explain. The other evening, I wanted to look up information on the shelf-life of semi-cooked meat, if unrefrigerated.  I put in words or phrases like "meat," "beef," "cooked chicken," "shelf," "life," "refrigerator," and "cooked" (without the quotes)  My results were links to alternative rock bands; complaints about fraudulent, on-line work-at-home businesses; very nasty pornography; carpentry; a bunch of poetry and religions; history of football; methamphetamine's; and how-to edit audio files.  Don't get me wrong; these are all interesting topics.  In fact, I spent the entire evening surfing from link to link.  Finally, I had to take a break.  I went to the kitchen and cut me a big hunk of old steak that had been sitting on the counter for that past few days.  Shortly after eating it, I got very ill.  I had to seek medical attention.  I thought I might have to take a bunch of prescription drugs.  What I'm saying is that I never got the information I was looking for in the first place--not from the Internet.  However, I did get some emperical experience on the matter.  I came to the conclusion that maybe a person shouldn't eat that stuff.

~ Bob Zaboo

I saw the ape man coming from over the hill to stand beside the river and drink his fill.  It was a night when the sky was dark and cloudy and filled with the ominous sense of doom.  Ape men never worry about frightful things.  Everything, for them, is both an opportunity and a challenge and many things represent tomorrow’s dinner.  “It’s what’s for dinner,” they may often say as they’re scraping the last hairs off their ill fashioned stone utensils.  The ape man hangs from a tree and doesn’t think about cars, or computers, or fashion, or who will be the next president, or whether some country half of a world away is going to do something nasty.  They are only concerned about whether they can jump from where they are hanging to the ground without breaking something in their own body.  Once in a while, one ape man will fight another ape man.  These altercations are usually over an ape woman or two.  Ape men like bananas and other fruit, and bugs, and grasshoppers, and anything else that is edible and not poisonous.  Ape men are not vegetarians, although plant life makes up most of their diet due to the fact that they would rather sit around the campfire and play music and whistle tunes they remember from their childhoods rather than get up to go out and kill something to eat.  They are known to pick bugs out of each other’s hair, out of trees, and out of water pools.  Sometimes they eat these bugs, but, more often than not, they just play with them or put them on a string and wear them.  No one reading this should try to equate ape men with any other form of human or animal that they have encountered in the past.  They are nothing like either of these.

~ Bob Zaboo

One degree, two degree, three degree, four…There are more degrees around than you can shake a stick at.  In fact, some people try to shake their sticks at degrees and some people even try to shake their stick after receiving degrees.   I like to shake my stick, if I can find it, at the change in degrees.  One minute it is one degree and then, before you know it, the next minute it is some totally different degree.   There seems no degree of stability at all when it comes to any sort of degree.  I am not sure what angle to take on this whole issue of degrees.  Seriously, are there smaller portions of degrees we need to be concerned about?  What would a freshman think about this concept?  Do they have any fresh ideas to bring to bear on the subject? Better yet, what about a sophomore? What about those other classmen?  If they were without class they would have no degree in the end.  Where would that leave them? What is of most concern is the degree of latitude allowed when considering degrees.  Some contend that degrees should be discrete, while others want to give degrees a large degree of freedom.  Personally, I think that we should be free to determine the degree that best suits us and enjoy that degree when we can find it.  After all, the degree to which we subjugate ourselves to the totalitarian concept of degree discrimination is the degree to which we allow ourselves to be without degrees of lenience.  No degree should be allowed to vary by that amount.

~ Bob Zaboo

In each of us is the capability of being really stupid and funny.  Most of us can do the stupid part without much training.  The funny part takes a lot more work.  It is paradoxical that funny takes a lot of work but work is not all that funny.  Does this make sense to anyone else or am I completely alone on this idea?  Anyway, in order to fine tune your sense of humor you must first see thing in a light that is not so bright but bright enough to see things even when it is dark or foggy either outside or even in your mind.  Speaking of minds, it is impossible to totally use your mind when attempting to be or find things funny.  Part of it has to come from within.  Emotions play a hugely significant role in recognizing hilarious things.  Consequently, unless you can feel the merriment in things there is little point in trying to actually create funniness and humor.  Some people like dry humor, just like they like dry martinis—shaken not stirred.  Others enjoy a remark that hits them in the funny bone, which, again, is not all that funny.  Trust me; I’ve hit my funny bone and other bones enough to know the difference between genuine pain and a humorous twang.  So, as a favor to all of us, both the serious and cantankerous, please don’t attempt comedy, even though it is a built in part of the human psyche, until you have learned to appreciate the complexities of making fun of important and serious issues or, at least, until you have learned the baby steps necessary to make things half-ways jocular.

~ Bob Zaboo

Jimmy Hendrix was ahead of his time.  Actually, he was also a head.  I’m not sure about now, because he died a while ago, but he still might have a head.  Luckily, I don’t need to know any of this and neither do you.  What is important is that Jimmy Hendrix played the electric guitar.  He strummed and picked it as if it was a sleazy, stringy, unwashed woman.  That’s probably why he sang the song, written by Bob (not thee Bob and not me), called “All Along the Washtub.”  Although, after playing intensely at a concert, based on videos that I have seen of these, I would say that Jimmy Hendrix, himself, needed a bathe in a tub from time to time.  Well, maybe Bob did too, for that matter.   Of course, sometimes, for that matter, so do I and everyone else that I know to have listened to Hendrix tunes or watched him on a video or television.  Once I saw a film of Jimmy Hendrix pouring gasoline on his guitar and lighting it on fire.  He then played some song on it.  It might have been the Star Strangled Banner but of this I am uncertain.  Needless to say, Hendrix didn’t get good gas millage that night and the repair job probably cost him a fortune.  Of course, he probably made a fortune pumping out those screechy, visceral tunes that he did.  All I can say is that Jimmy Hendrix has become a local hero and important in other parts of the country as well.
 
~ Bob Zaboo