The Ruffles Report

It is no surprise that my two-legs does not like people. Scratch that. He likes watching and observing people, but that generally means you have to be around them… unless you have either powerful binoculars or a camera with a paparazzi-style lens (which he does on both counts). One of the largest gatherings of “people” in the Seattle area is Hempfest. Year after year, waves upon waves of dirty, pot smoking hippies swarm to Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park to smoke pot support legalization, express their love for brownies humanity, build up a customer base grassroots movement, and overall just hang out and listen to noise music.

This was my two-legs second year in attendance. And while four-legs are not technically allowed, everyone there was too high to stop us. Read on.

Phase 1: Infiltration

Like a swarm of red-eyed locusts they descend.

We began by scouting around the primary entrance. This was midday on Saturday. It was packed to the brim. Myrtle Edwards Park is a perfect place to cage hippies. To the West is Puget Sound. Hippies hate water (just go smell one). To the East is a set of railroad tracks, bordered with high fences. At the North end are two small footpaths, one of which crosses aforementioned tracks. And to the South is the primary entrance. Pictured above. We opted to walk the extra mile up to the northern, less heavily guarded entrance. Along the way we met this charming fellow:

A small contingent of hippies trekked with us.

He was taking a break from HempFest to try to find a place to get some beer around here. We directed him to a Shell station half a mile back. Cottonmouth is a dangerous health hazard that affects many fest-goers. As we talked with the hippies we seemed to gain their trust. It is easy for me to blend in with a crowd. I am small, and my hair was pretty shaggy that day. My two-legs is a different story. If there was every a poster boy for a dorky narc, he is it. Add to that the fact he was carrying his giant camera with him. I was so embarrassed.

Phase 2: The chicken is in the Pot

This is the "tame" side of the event

We entered the loosely fenced off area and began to soak up the fun. Pretty standard fare if you ask me. Lots of two-legs, just wandering aimlessly around. Sometimes stopping to look at hemp clothes and bongs, or stand and sway for a few moments in front of the many music stands where generic beats keep tempers low. Mellow man.

Out of the pier, away from the hippies, provides a pretty good shot.

We typically stayed toward the fringes of the event. This was out on the fishing pier. Hippies on the rocks, hippies on the ground, hippies in tents. There was no escape. The big grey thing is the grain tower. The weird art deco thing is the Space Needle. The largest white tent was playing rave music, not typically hippie fare, unless they need to swing those tennis balls in socks like they like to do. The breeze was blowing the sweet smell of freedom inland.

Phase 3: Mary Jane and Me

We were about halfway through, sticking to the coast.

This is probably about half a mile from the last picture. Definitely headed into pot infested waters up ahead. Most of the canopies belong to food vendors. Delicious food. It was really odd though, my sense of smell could not really pick up on any tasty treats, a local source was overpowering it. I did manage to score half a brownie when my two-legs was not looking. Pretty tasty.

This was what my two-legs saw. I just saw ankles.

And then we were trapped. No movement. No direction. Just people. More and more kept piling on behind us. And no one seemed to care. They all just sort of shuffled around and chatted and toked. No pushing. No yelling. Just “This is really strange, man.” and “Do you think we’ll start moving.” We were now about 1000 feet from freedom the main entrance. It turns out, so many people were trying to come in, and so many other people were to leave, it just sort of bottle-necked. And then all order collapsed. My two-legs stood there for a while, then realized nothing was happening, and he was not high so milling around is no fun. We then did a 180 to make it back to the North entrance.

Phase 4: Escape

Going back was basically just like coming in. Push through the hippies.

My two-legs has a pretty good eye for composition. The banner in the background with the event title. The giant pot leaf. And two-legs from all walks of life. Old guy. Shirtless dude. Teeny boppers. Psychedelic shirt guy. Middle aged hippies. Truly all the colors of the rainbow here.

Getting out was pretty easy. Bobbed and weaved. Inhale deeply. Check out the scenery.

This two-legs was making crazy sounds come out of this stick. It fascinated the hippies.

Phase 5: Rest

All in all it was pretty darn fun. I got to explore all afternoon with my two-legs and he got to take pictures and observe other two-legs. And the best part is big-little-bro did not get to come. Karma for all the times the skirted-one takes him on walks without me. I will bet he never gets to taste colors like I did.

OK, I am really going to nerd out here a bit. So if you were looking for a cute story about me napping or harassing big-little-bro you will just have to come back in a couple days.

My two-legs is a huge nerd, and having lived around him for a few years his nerdiness has begun to rub off. I asked him to set up Google webmaster account for my domain. It has some cool referral stuff, and shows where your page is ranking in searches (there is much more cool stuff in there but I have not figured out what it is for yet). Page ranking is a tricky business. Companies spent untold amounts of money trying to get their web pages ranked number one on the various search engines. I know personally that I never go beyond the first page of Google results. If it did not come up at the top, I probably did not define my search properly. Page ranking also varies on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You may be king for a while, but someone else is always trying to knock you down. Let us see how TRR ranks with the Google:

You can try these out, none really worked for me.

These are results from the last 7 days (there are even weirder ones further back). I tried most of these links, and could not find my little corner of the web. *Sigh*
One that was very interesting (and for whatever reason not shown here) is I rank in the top 10ish for “what is ruffles” and of course, number 1 for “the ruffles report.”
But, are people honestly going to be searching for me? Like one day they think, “oh, I wonder if any dogs named ruffles are blogging about themselves” No. They are probably going to find me via referrals (or “friends”).

The two-legs’ web host has some decent tracking tools, one of which is the referral URL (how people got to my site). The top referrer is… *drumroll* … valria.wordpress.com! She has sent me a whooping 85 unique visits for the past year. I have no idea if they stayed to read anything, but I like to believe they did… I can hope.

Suck it Bing!

Here is some of the other data (because I know everyone loves to look at stats). Pretty standard stuff, except for the flux of people who found me via domaintools.com using a whois search… I guess therufflesreport.com is more valuable than previously thought. Hooray for land grabs.

And just for the fun of it, let us look at the number of unique visits to my little blog here:

Check out July, thanks for the support in my sad times!

So, why all this talk of visitors and referrers and other things you probably do not care about. Well, I was checking out the tumblarity of some two-legs I know (no, my two-legs does not tumble) and lately I have just been thinking about blogging, and internet popularity and all that jazz. I honestly do not know what to make of it all.

Hmmm, I honestly thought I would be able to come up with something more profound than all that, some sort of all all encompassing nugget of wisdom. I have thought on it a great deal (after all, I do nap and think every hour of every day) and I have not reached a definitive conclusion on anything.

“The internet is frickin’ awesome.” (I think we all can agree on that one) There is a great deal of noise though. “But we can generally filter the noise and only get what we want.” But there is just so much content out there. “True but so much of it is just rehashing of previous content and/or junk; so we rank the content.” But who does the ranking? “The crowds.” Hrmmmm. Do we trust the crowd? “Well, we can start with friends and family, see what they like, who they follow, and then build our own little internet crowd.” So, like a clique in high school? “Yes like a clique… no, no, no. It’s better. Cuz they are like, our friends, but we don’t really know them, but they post funny or interesting or insightful stuff, that we like.”  Do you happen to know what an echo chamber is (metaphorically)? “It’s not an echo chamber, it’s fun, and I like it, and shut up.”

The preceding was a conversation I had with myself the other day while looking introspectively at my own internet habits. I spend a fair amount of time surfing the intertubes. Not too much, just enough I would say. Certainly I could be on it more. There are some core sites I visit, I live by my feed reader. Some comics, some tech stuff. I do not really follow any two-legs directly, or any four-legs directly. To be quite honest, there is simply too much stuff out there. To many bloggers, too many tumblrs, two many twitterers, way too much stuff on youtube, quite frankly I just try to block it all out.

But there is a trap there, if I do not follow people, does that conversely mean people will not follow me? If I do not make my web presence known through blog rings, and referrals, and ranking, and search engine optimization, and re-tweeting, and re-tumblring, and generally being part of the Internet community, will I be left blog alone in my own little corner. Is a blog with no readers truly a blog?

My two-legs leaves me alone for a week for big-little-bro and the skirted one. He comes home, things are great. We have a nice weekend together, life seems good.

Last week, he might as well have been out of town. I never saw him. He would leave the house early, the skirted one would still be sleeping, I would be nestled in my little bed. He would just get up, shower, and walk out. We were all still asleep. Sometimes he would not even pet me goodbye. How rude!

I would have to sit at home all day, napping and dealing with big-little-bro. He would stumble in with the skirted one at 2000 or 2100. Then we would take a quick jaunt around the block. Then he would go back to bed. Is that lame or what? If I was lucky he would pet me for 20 or 30 minutes before going to sleep, but those days were few and far between.

On the weekend, which is supposed to be our time, he mostly just slept. No 4-legs park. No long walks. No nothing.

Yesterday he was all grumpy because a hard drive of his failed. I do not care if lost tons of data. I want to go for a long walk dammit! (He apparently had most of it backed up somewhere, but not everything. Always backup your data, and never buy Maxtor drives.)

Today he left early again. I can only hope this trend does not continue. I am in dire need of attention.

Exciting news! My two-legs is back!

It was just a normal Thursday afternoon. I was napping. Then suddenly he walked in. “O frivolous day! Callooh! Callay!” I chortled in my joy.

I immediately grabbed Frog and began prancing around, to show him just how happy I was.

My back arched in excited as I show him how much I missed him by carrying Frog around.

Big-little-bro kept on trying to steal the show and gain my master’s attention, but I knew he was there only for me. Even though I was so excited I nearly wet myself, I did my best to play it coy. I paraded to one end of the room to the other, all the while dragging Frog along for the ride. This would show him I missed him right? If I cavorted around with a toy larger than I am? I moved so fast I must have looked like a blur to him.

Bounding, skipping, mincing, sashaying, romping, springing, capering! (Boy am I glad I can read a thesaurus)

Then, like dinner, it was gone. The excitement died down. Balance was restored. And my two-legs gave me pets for the next few hours.
He had better not leave me ever again.

OK, I think I have stopped crying enough to post about what has to be the saddest day of my life.

Thursday seemed to be going fine. My-two legs went to work early, the skirted-one left around 10:00 , and big-little-bro and I spend the next 8 hours napping. Then my two-legs came home, and it was good. But something was off. He started to put things into a big black bag. And he stuck his computer (which is always at his desk) into a backpack. Well this is odd, I thought, but maybe he is just tired of having everything out and about. Right? Right?

No such luck. Instead of our normal walk, he gave me to the skirted-one, and my two-legs took his bags. What could be more important than taking me for walk. Apparently, abandoning me. We walked over the big bus stop, the same place where nearly a week earlier I got the glorious surprise of new two-legs to show me affection, and then the skirted-one stopped at the top of the stairs but my two-legs kept walking. He just kept going and going. It was all I could do to watch… and cry.

I think our crying softened up the two-legs, because after what seemed like eternity, the skirted-one took us down the steps to the platform, to see my two-legs one last time. Almost as soon as we got down there, a giant wheeled vehicle came. My two-legs got on. I cried. The doors slammed shut. I cried. The vehicle drove away. I cried.

As we walked back home, I had a burst a hope. A vehicle drove and parked almost right in front of us. This was it, my two-legs was just playing some horrible, horrible prank on us. Various two-legs stepped out. But not my-legs. My heart sank.

We got back home. I waited.

The waiting begins. Approx 9:00 PM on Thursday.

A few hours past, big-little bro gave up, I waited.

Waiting. Approx 10:00 PM on Thursday

More time past. He will be home soon. I know it.

Still waiting. Approx. 10:45 PM on Thursday

A new day. A new chance to wait. He will be home today. I know he will.

Yep, more waiting. Approx 3:00 PM on Friday

And yet, he never comes. My master has left me. Never to return. I am left alone with the skirt-one and big-little-bro. *Sigh*
July 23, 2009. The saddest day of my life.