It was a big asteroid. "Ten percent chance of hitting Earth," they said. "Expected angle of impact is enough to wipe out a country."

"We'll use Nuclear weapons!"

They aimed. They fired. They miscalculated.

The asteroid deflected in the wrong direction, hit Earth head-on, and wiped out all life. Except the cockroaches, of course.

So I've been tagged (If your office firewall blocks this because of the objectionable word in the URL, you can try this link. It's the top post).

I don't always do tags, but this is a post I've been wanting to write for at least a year and a half. So I've decided to give up on procrastination for just long enough to get this post done.

Basically, I'm supposed to write a post on the different words/phrases entered by people in search engines, that lead them to this blog. And because I started using Google Analytics a little less than a year ago, I have access to almost every search word used to reach this site since then. So I'll be doing this post as a series.

I'll start with one of the most common set of search terms that leads people to my blog.

Searches relating to Arranged Marriage - Long, long ago, so long ago, that I don't even remember how long ago, I wrote a post on Arranged Marriages. That's one post on the topic. And 8% of the hits on this blog, end up at that post. Here's a sampling of the kinds of search strings that people have used:

1. Arranged Marriage Statistics - That's given me 242 hits in the last 11 months. And from the comments on that post, I believe that these are mainly sociology students. So the crap I wrote, has probably ended up being used in someone's research project! I don't know whether to be proud, or worry that my opinion from a couple of years ago on a matter that I have absolutely no knowledge about, just might be considered Expert Opinion!
2. Giving up on love for arranged marriage - This one scares me. What if someone was trying to decide whether they should wait to find their true love, or just give in to parental pressure and have an arranged marriage? And what if it was my post that convinced this person to go in for an arranged marriage? What if they'd have found their true love if they had not read my post, and just waited for a few more months? What if I stood in the way of true love? How can I live with the burden of such a grave sin? My hair are turning gray from worrying.
3. Is arranged marriage legal in the united states? - What???
4. Arranged Marriages don't work
5. Arranged Marriages are Bad
6. Arranged Marriages are Evil - Okay, okay, I believe you!

Makes me wonder if I should have started a matrimonial site instead.

Update: I know I'm supposed to tag other people, but I'll make it an open invitation instead. If you feel like doing the tag, leave a comment, and I'll tag you.
Alternatively, if you want to know how to track search terms for your blog, or you want to get a counter that has that feature, let me know and I'll try to help out.

Update 2: Tagging Anwin and Deaths Head Roy.

He woke up. He was on the train, going home. The coach was empty, except for him. And the little girl across the aisle. She looked at him, her eyes red with tears. She looked scared. "I want to get off," she said...

He woke up. He was on the train, going home...

A glorious day for a motorcycle ride. Clear skies, the shining sun, cool winds, chirping birds, and flowers in bloom. "This," he thought, "is what paradise must be like." Lost in his thoughts, he didn't see the light turn red before he crossed it. A truck driver in a hurry ran him over.

One more short short.

War

"How long before they reach the castle?"

"Our army will probably be able to hold them off for an hour at the most."

"And the secret passageway out of the city?"

"It was never finished, your highness."

"Well then," said the king. "I'm off to sleep."

"Sleep?"

"I always wanted to die in my sleep."

The End

Long time, no short. Yes, I know. Apologies to those of you who've been disappointed by my update frequency, but work's been a killer.

Anyway. I found the responses to my previous story quite interesting, specially considering that I thought I was responding to popular demand. I should probably have paid more attention to the tale about the Miller and his son. Well, atleast I haven't lost my ass yet.

Whatever. Here's the next one.

Note: This one's just a bit on the geeky side, and requires remembering some grade school physics.

Invisible

They called him a mad scientist.

He looked at his invisibility potion. He'd show them.

So he drank the potion. And every part of him was transparent. Including his eyes.

Refraction stopped working. He was blind.

He could see no one. And no one could see him.

It drove him mad.

The End

People have complained that there's been too much morbidity in my stories recently, and that it shows that there's something wrong with my head. Well, in my defense I've been reading Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, and the stories in it are hardly cheerful, if you know what I mean.

Anyway. Here's the next installment of the 55-word story.

Ever After?

They met. They fell in love. They courted.

Soon he got a job, and they got married. They fought a little, but mostly it was a good marriage. They had two children - a boy and a girl.

They lived happily together till he died at the age of seventy-nine. She died a year later.

The End

Now don't tell me that dying of old age is also too morbid.

After a weekend and a day full of catching up with work, here is another short short.

Hitman

"Twelve," he thought, as he wiped the blade on the body.

They called him a hitman. He called himself a messenger.

"One murder or a dozen, there is only one Hell," he thought to himself as he dragged the body into a bush.

The Devil stood nearby, watching. He smiled.

The End

This is hard to stop.

Run

Sally won the gold medal for the 100-metre sprint for two years straight. The third year she came second by a hair's width.

That evening they found the winner's dead body in a dumpster. They caught Sally when her motorcycle fell and the bloody knife fell out.

She could run, but she couldn't ride.

The End

Another short story.

Stone

"Why stone?" asked the girl.

"I was alive once," said the gargoyle.

"I too laughed, played, danced, loved...

"And lost.

"It hurt. I cried. The pain was unbearable.

"So I turned into stone. Stone feels no pain."

The girl looked at the gargoyle silently. Then she walked away.

The gargoyle didn't.

The End

How about a fairy-tale short short?

Princess Diaries

There was once a princess who slept on a pea and hurt her back. Seven dwarf lawyers sued an evil witch for it. The princess beat the witch with her glass slipper. This broke a spell and the witch turned into a handsome prince. The frog was jealous, but they lived happily ever after.

The End

Here's a murder mystery in 55 words.

Murder

The detectives arrive on the scene.

"Looks like murder," they say. "He's been shot in the chest."

The maid is sobbing. The wife seems to be in shock.

"Do you suspect anyone, ma'am?" they ask the wife.

She looks at them sadly. "The gun's in the cupboard. He was having an affair with the maid."

The End

Attempt number two (or three, depends on how you're counting) at the tag.
A fable this time.

Slow And Steady

"Race?" suggested the hare.

"Sure," said the tortoise. The tortoise always wins, he thought.

"Ready, set, go!"

The hare bounced away. The tortoise shuffled forward slowly.

I won’t stop for a nap this time, thought the hare. Half way to the finish line, a hunter shot him dead.

The tortoise always wins.

The End

So what kind of story can you write in less than 55 words? Any kind, really.

Do you?

"Go on!" his friends urge him. "Tell her how you feel. You never know. She may feel the same way about you too."

So he walks over to her. "I love you," he says. "Do you love me too?"

She pauses for a moment before replying. He looks familiar. "No", she decides finally.

The End

More tomorrow. So do come back!

I'd be grateful if no one noticed that I've cheated by back-dating this post by a couple of hours. I blame this on one of my roommates who used IE (that browser from hell) on some suspicious websites on my laptop over the weekend as a result of which I had to spend a large part of the evening off the network scanning my (mostly full) 60 Gig harddrive for viruses.

Here's a snippet of a conversation I had with a friend today -

"Today is Blog Day," she said.
"Oh, I thought it was Wednesday," I replied.
"My God! Do you really think that was funny?" she asked incredulously.
"No," I said, "but it was definitely worth a try."
"You need help," she said.
"Someone comes up with yet another Hallmark holiday, and I'm the one that needs help?"
"Oh, come on. You're acting like you're Scrooge or something."
"Wow. I've never heard you use that kind of language before."
"No, no! Scrooge! With a G!"
"Scrooge?"
"Yes. From A Christmas Carol?"
"Which one?"
"No, the book!"
"There's a christmas carol that's as long as a book talking about something called Scrooge?"
"Rajesh!"
"Ok, ok! I'm Scrooge."

And that's how it went. More or less.

So, today is Blog Day, or as Technorati calls it, BlogDay2005. And they chose the 31st of August, because '3108', looks like 'Blog' in the forgotten tongue of the Dogonowa tribe of central Africa. Something like that anyway.

Conversation snippet # 2 -

"3108?" I asked. "That's so stupid. It should have been 3106."
"Ah," she replied.
"I'm sure whoever came up with the idea probably didn't want to wait till June next year to celebrate it. So they just went with August."
"The 31st of June?" she asked.
"Yes. But it's two months too late, right? So they probably thought..."
"The 31^st of June?" she repeated.
"Yes?"
"So it's like a leap year then?"
"Oh."

Anyway.

Apparently, today's the day that Bloggers have, that is "dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On this day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors." And I'm supposed to find five blogs to link to.

Even though replicating my blogroll here would be quite easy, the intent is to go and discover new blogs (which I shall take to mean blogs I'd not come across before), and recommend five of them to you. Of course, I shall still cheat, and name blogs I've come across only recently, or blogs I don't visit very often but like very much nonetheless.

• Samit Basu is India's first SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy, for the uninitiated) writer. I discovered him fairly recently, when I saw a Terry Pratchett reference to his book The Simoqin Prophecies which was published when we was 23. (Why didn't I drop out of an IIM? Heck, why didn't I ever apply to an IIM?)


• Eric Raymond is the geek who's probably most known for his paper The Cathedral And The Bazaar. He knows Terry Pratchett! If only Terry Pratchett had a blog too. Sadly, he doesn't.


• But at least Neil Gaiman does. I haven't read Gaiman's Sandman comic books, but I've been hearing a lot of good stuff about them. I have read Good Omens though. He co-authored it with Terry Pratchett.


• Post Secret is a blog I drop in at every now and then. Frank Warren asked people to send him postcards with secrets anonymously in November 2004. It was supposed to be his contribution to a Washington DC art exhibition. Today it's a way for people to share their secrets with millions of people around the world. Sometimes funny. Sometimes angry. Mostly very moving.


• Kiran Jonnalagadda or Jace for short. He worked for The Jasubhai Group's Digit magazine once, and maintained a technology forum at www.Lunateks.com. I helped him maintain it at one time, until both of us got busy. The site was run off one of Digit's servers until it went offline.

There. Done.