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