It would be nice to think that Grumpy Old Sod dot Com was fulfilling some kind of useful purpose.
We describe it as "an internet voice for the exasperated". It would be good if some of the many frustrated people in this country could turn to our website to find informed, balanced comment, to feel that they are not alone in their despair, and that others share their belief that life could somehow be better.
It would be even nicer if we could feel that some of the stupid, venal, self-serving jobsworths we feature in our pages might be at least a little embarrassed by what we have to say about them. Or that our political masters might occasionally stumble across themselves portrayed so vividly, and be humbled. Or, failing all that, we could derive some satisfaction from just being bloody rude to some of the tosspots who annoy us.
Certainly, to judge from the number of visitors we have had - almost one-and-a-half-million hits in less than a year - we do seem to be fulfilling a need.
But what, we wondered, did these people come looking for? Was it our wit? Our wisdom? Our irreverent slant on the established tenets of society? Our fresh approach to politics and religion?
Well no. Most of them came looking for "Readers' Wives".
We've got this nifty web-page we can visit, you see, where they tell us all sorts of interesting stuff like how many visitors we've had, what search engines they used to get here, how many pages they looked at, which page they were looking at when they finally got fed up and moved away, and even what they had typed into their search boxes to find us.
So we know that over 30,000 people read just one page and then went away, in disgust, presumably. We know that 3 people read more than 100 pages (we didn't know we had 100 pages - perhaps they read some of them twice). We know that nearly 50 people spent over an hour with us, so either they were very interested, or they are very slow readers. We know that the page they were least interested in is the one about Freedom & Democracy, which is rather upsetting as we think it's a really good one. We know that our Grumpy Links Page is quite popular, and so are our Wankers of the Week - that's good.
And I kid you not, by far the most common search expression was "readers wives". And 49% of all our visitors looked at our Readers' Wives page, sniggered a bit, and then went straight off to find some proper porn. Sad gits.
Not that we've got anything against internet porn, mind you. I mean, all men like looking at girls, don't they? And given the choice between girls with clothes and girls without …. whew, hard choice, I don't think. And if you have to choose between pictures of old ladies knitting and young ladies having rampant sex in undignified positions? Well …. the GOS would go for the knitting every time. Not.
Have you noticed that whenever the internet is discussed in the media, it's always the porn that upsets people? The fact that the internet gives us all the opportunity to express our views doesn't register with them, apparently. Nor does it occur to them that this is the only truly democratic institution in the world. Stupid people, clever people, ignorant people, well-informed people, frivolous people, serious people - their opinions, their advice, their experiences, their philosophies, their humour, their honesty, their prejudices, their lunacy and their wisdom are all there for the finding.
Want to know how to bake a cake? Build a boat? Fly? Pass an exam? Play the piano? Examine yourself for breast cancer? Speak Serbo-Croat? Apply for a job? Start a website? It's all there - you just have to put the right keywords in the little box.
Need to know facts? Who won the FA Cup in 1983? What the fastest bird is? How deep the sea is? How many stars are there? The longest name in the Bible? (It's Mahershalalhashbaz). The meaning of "hydroxydeoxycorticosterone"? (Sorry, couldn't be arsed). They're all there for the finding.
It's marvellous, really. And the chat! The GOS is building a boat in his garage at the moment, and thanks to the internet he's been able to talk about it, swap building hints and photographs of it, with blokes who are building the same boat in Canada and Australia. How wonderful is that?
But all these pundits can think of is that some sad git might be saying "Oh dear, I just looked at a picture of some girl with a bloke's willy up her bum. I'd better go out and kill someone".
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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