RM’s Thoughts

Score another one for Alton Brown, Creamy Garlic Mashed Potatoes, received rave reviews tonight along side Garrett’s leg of lamb, which also comes with a recommendation for Alhambra Halal Meats at 24th and Folsom. There’s something satisfying about making a request to a butcher and watching him walk in to the meat cooler and come out and go over to the band saw with a whole carcass, this is the place to go for meat. As for the mashed potatoes round 2 was much better than my practice attempt. The main differences were using a garlic press to puree rather than mince it and being a little more generous with the salt. I’ve never had better, though I wasn’t much of a fan of them in the past. Other highlights included Tartine bread and cake. The bread has become a fixture at our dinners.

Neces.com is the #1 result for “madam tuso” and #2 for “madame tuso” on google (and does pretty well on other search engines.) While there seems to be a lot at work in this, page rank doesn’t seem to be a factor since my site’s pagerank was 1 the last time I looked. The above searches point at this album in my gallery. Those pictures were taken when I was in Vegas for a friend’s wedding and hanging out with another friend Ivy who lived there at the time.

So why is neces.com the #1/#2 result? Well one of the major contributing factors has to be the spelling of madame, madam when I put the photos in my gallery. It seems to be a very common type-o according to google trends, about 75% of the correct madame tuso (though the data for the terms seems funky.) My only other guess is that my site is a good answer for the search terms, when I get visits from those keywords people view an average of 6 pages and spend a few minutes on my site. Granted these aren’t very busy keywords, few hundred a month, but I still think it’s cool.

So the title of this post, 67 Countries, is about the number of countries I get visits from according to Google Analytics. I have hits from 6 of the 7 continents, that’s pretty cool, not sure about Antarctica, google analytics doesn’t seem to show it :). The top country, not surprisingly is the United States. The Netherlands, United Kingdom (home of the original Madame Tuso’s,) Germany, and Sweden round out the top 5. The rest of the top 15 are dominated by, somewhat surprisingly to me, by middle eastern countries including Israel, Pakistan, and Iran, though by that point the number of hits per month have dropped off considerably.

The only other thing my site (seems) to show up often for is me. So I’ve gone international, pretty cool eh?

The worst negative ad I can remember.

And an excellent response.

The race has been called for Hagan, but results aren’t yet complete. Dole was an incumbent and projected to win until recently. I wonder how much this ad and response had to do with the outcome. It has received a lot of national coverage so I would imagine it’s all over the place in NC. Using an ad like that shows a lack of character as far as I’m concerned so regardless of reason I think it’s a good result. I feel like there’s been a lot of things along the same lines being lobbed at Obama by Republicans with for the most part the exception of McCain, Palin being the most prominent and vocal of them.

this one is a throwback, something like 5 or 6 years ago.