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Pigeon's Cack

What does "cack" mean in Arabic? I keep getting hits on this page from people searching MSN Arabia for "cack". This puzzles me. So if you know what "cack" means in Arabic, please tell me. I don't like to disappoint my readers, and as long as Arabic cack isn't something really horrible I feel I ought to put some up.

Cack Index

I have a forum stalker
Shipwrecked (A Christmas Tale) - please email this link to all your friends. –  Arseholes to "Auld Lang Syne"
Blu-tack –  Do not be afraid of freedom and love
Iesus iterum salvat 11/11/2006 –  Cleaning conundrum...
Music plays 03/11/2006 –  Jesus showed me the way (to Halfords)
This one is not a fucking wreck 03/11/2006 –  ...and this one is a cracker
Life is strange sometimes... 30/10/2006 –  ...here we go again 28/12/2006
...yes, here we bloody go 21/01/2007 –  An interesting week 05/03/2007
An SMTP gateway for myspace messages? –  Where is this street?

Introduction to Pigeon's Cack

It's interesting looking at the server logs for this site. The Trilink hydrostatic transmission page gets plenty of hits from people searching Google images for hydraulic pretty well anything, the Deltic workshop manual page gets its share of hits for some reason, and the computer stuff pages attract a steady trickle of hits from people who have the same obscure problems that I have had (unfortunately very few of them give me feedback on whether my pages helped them). And there are plenty of hits on the Joey Deacon page, which seems to have a remarkably high Google rating - for a "pages from the UK" search it even ranks ahead of the "official" Joey Deacon site's new URL.

But the most notable feature is the amount of interest there is in the rants section. Plenty of people read one rant and then go on to read most or all of the others. It's weird. Those pages are mainly there to provide me with a place to get things off my chest. I wouldn't have thought pages and pages of strongly and profanely expressed anger would be all that appealing, but plenty of people seem to enjoy reading it.

Oh, I admit that one or two of the rants have some useful stuff in, like the Dell Poweredge 2450 RAID Key (PERC enabler) page, which tells you how to build your own for a couple of quid instead of paying 80 quid odd for the Dell part, and the youtube rant which analyses the evil obfuscation on youtube videos in sufficient detail for anyone with moderate intelligence to work out how to download the videos on any platform, and includes ready-made methods for Linux. And a few people have downloaded the source code for Attack of the Lesbian Communists (The Greenham Common Game), though I don't see any 3D Linux versions in development yet. But those rants aren't particularly popular ones. Hardly anyone reads the RAID key one, only the odd techy type, and those who read the youtube one have found it off Google while looking for some other utility with the same name as my Linux script and don't go on to read the rest of the rants. So it's not the useful content that appeals. People just seem to like reading them.

And then there are the Peculiar Pages. The contact page has a lot of weird stuff on it, and is part of a circular list of the other pages on the site which also have weird stuff on. Plenty of people seem to read through those. One reader said that if he ever needed a perfect illustration of the fine line between genius and madness he'd use my page on macroscopic quantum phenomena, which pretty much made my day, as did the reader who described them as "absolutely barking" and "a perfect example of Britishness" or something like that. Those pages have even less point than the rants, they're just me picking some odd topic and burbling on about it from my variant columbine viewpoint.

Yet people not only read them, they seem to like them. Fuck knows why. The only conclusion I can draw is that there's something about my writing which appeals to people. Maybe I should be a writer... never really thought of myself as a writer. If I did anything "arts" I'd be a photographer. Landscape, for preference - the car and bike shots are more documentary than anything else, it's landscape that I like and I don't have to rely on log file analysis to know that other people like it too. Or I could be a glamour photographer. No, you dorks, not for a cheap thrill, being behind the camera induces a very spaced and detached viewpoint which has the effect that such considerations simply don't come into it - effectively, you become one with the camera (man), and a camera has no sexual function, so you don't either... if that makes any kind of sense. (Similarly, when I was photographing John Lees' Barclay James Harvest in concert, I was barely aware of the music much of the time, which was a bit of a bummer.) It's just that I think the standard needs improving, I'm sure I could do a better job with an old box brownie than half the fucking gibbons out there who don't seem to know one end of a camera from the other, or a woman for that matter... Second option would be a musician. I've written the odd song and have half a clue about singing them but my appreciation of how to go about musical composition is eclectic and technical and unlikely to make it easy to get a band together. Writer I'd never really thought about, but perhaps I should give it a shot.

So here's a bunch of pages containing random cack. If people like my cack I can produce plenty of it... This is not focussed angry cack like the rant pages, nor does it describe certain particular topics in detail like the Peculiar Pages. It's just thoughts about this and that, stream of consciousness type stuff I guess, though I prefer "random cack". You might call it "blog" only it's not in any kind of blog format and is dated only where relevant. And anyway I don't like that word. It's just cack which I hope may provide entertainment in some vague sense, or some other kind of undefined positive result, since people seem to like my cack. If you do like my cack please read it. If you don't like my cack please don't read it otherwise I'll think you do. You can contact me about my cack if you like.

Anyway, that's enough of that, here's the cack. Please bear in mind that my ancestry is Celtic on one side and Viking on the other, and half Celtic half Viking adds up to whole person who is apparently spaced on magic mushrooms all the time without having to actually take any. Fortunately the Celtic side wins out so they're psilocybes rather than bloody fairytale gnome toadstools. The juxtaposition of muscarine and the contents of my head would be as inappropriate as the juxtaposition of the most beautiful woman in the world and a shite plastic car. The Viking side manifests itself mainly in my attraction to old Volvos, and the most beautiful woman in the world can rest assured that old Volvos are neither shite nor plastic.

I have a forum stalker
Shipwrecked (A Christmas Tale) - please email this link to all your friends.
Arseholes to "Auld Lang Syne"
Blu-tack
Do not be afraid of freedom and love
Iesus iterum salvat 11/11/2006
Cleaning conundrum...
Music plays 03/11/2006
Jesus showed me the way (to Halfords)
This one is not a fucking wreck 03/11/2006
...and this one is a cracker
Life is strange sometimes... 30/10/2006
...here we go again 28/12/2006
...yes, here we bloody go 21/01/2007
An interesting week 05/03/2007
An SMTP gateway for myspace messages?
Where is this street?

Be kind to pigeons