Being the webmaster of a University, and having to answer the webmaster@ email address, I get the joy of wading through metric tons of spam. My filter does a pretty good job with most things, but one class of spam it doesn’t deal with very well is link exchange requests. You know— the “I think our sites are similar and if you link to me I’ll link to you” garbage. A word to the wise: No university webmaster is ever going to link to you because you send them an email and ask them to. I won’t even link to half the folks within the university, in a vain attempt to keep the information architecture under control. Anyway, these link exchange requests usually go straight into the trash, but the other day I received on that gave me pause. It started out like this:
I have found your website humboldt.edu by searching Yahoo for “hotel california song meaning”.
Which has a special freakiness for me, because I cannot escape from Hotel California. It’s like I can check out anytime I like, but I can never leave. I hear that song at least once a week, despite my best efforts not to. This all started when I realized about a year ago that I hear Hotel California at least once on every roadtrip. You know when you get out into the middle of nowhere, and you can’t get anything on the radio but a crappy classic rock station? As soon as that happens I know I’m about to hear the Eagles. And not just any Eagles song. I decided that Hotel California was probably never off the radio; that at any point in time there is some station somewhere playing it. As soon as I started telling my friends my little theory, I started hearing it more and more. So, after receiving this particular piece of spam, I decided I had to make sure HSU wasn’t really coming up on Yahoo searches for “hotel california song meaning”. I went through the first 100 results before I got bored, and saw no references to our school, thank goodness. I did, however, find way too many sites that discuss the meaning of that song. I’m not linking to any of them, because I need to free myself from this whole Hotel California thing. This is my catharsis. Thanks for listening.