Some of you will know where this is going

Stan's seemingly random wanderings in southwest Missouri and eastern Oklahoma reminded me that I needed to get back to planning this summer's vacation. Since no one has invited me anywhere, I decided I would visit California -- since according to the Discovery Channel and the History Channel it is in imminent danger of being crumbled by an earthquake, wiped away by a tsunami, or becoming uninhabitable because of Hispanic gangs.

While actually meeting people that you meet online is clearly not a good idea, I have toyed with the idea of arranging a meeting with the blog's most frequent visitor, who resides in Sunnyvale, California. While some of you visit twice or more a day, my Sunnyvale visitor drops in almost every hour on some days. Besides, Sunnyvale is just a cool-sounding place to visit.

Since the visitor from Sunnyvale has never left a comment, I knew it was going to take a little thought as to how to identify who it was, and how to set up a meeting -- all somewhat delicate undertakings. I started by searching for information about Sunnyvale -- I knew that it was mostly fruit factories before it became part of Silicon Valley. It has a giant fruit-can water tower (photo above). I live not far from a giant catsup-bottle water tower (photo below). That's not enough to build a friendship on, but it would get us through one or two courses of dinner.

As it turns out, Sunnyvale is also home to Yahoo! and my most-frequent visitor is not a people but a bot, one of the little devils that search engines send out in order to index the web. Bots find page content, which is then stored on the search engines computers -- when you use a search engine, you are searching its index and not the web per se. All of which means that I have no actual person in Sunnyvale with whom to share the Chicken Tikka Massalaa and some Kebabs. Oh well, maybe my second most-frequent visitor will have chromosomes.