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Thursday, August 17, 2006

What's in a name?

A few years ago four friends went to mid-Wales. They stayed in a cabin in a wood out in the wilds. One of the nearest villages was called Pantperthog.

Now, it’s probably supposed to be pronounced Pant-per-thog, but we called it Pant-pert-hog, which makes it sound like a frisky piggie who’s a bit more excited than he should be!

It’s a sign!
I had my photo taken with the Pantperthog sign, probably because I’m a bit sad like that. Then a couple of years after we went to mid-Wales and discovered Pantperthog, we went to Moray in Scotland on holiday. We stayed in a place called Dallas, which apparently was the reason Dallas, Texas, was so named.

Dallas was so small it had no amenities, except a postbox. It didn’t even have a pub. But this being the highlands, it naturally had a distillery. In fact the Dallas Distillery is apparently one of the highlights of the Highlands Distillery Car Tour. Presumably if you’re on the car tour, you aren’t sampling the product at all the distilleries you’ve visited. Although that would explain the way people drive on highland roads…

Anyway, near Dallas was the little village of Knockando, which sounds a little bit like ‘No Can Do’ (especially if you say it in a comedy high-pitched Scottish accent – which we did). I was hoping there’d be a nearby village called Knockanrun, but no such luck. Still, I got a photo of me with the sign.

Pantperthog the googlewhack
I decided to call my blog ‘from Pantperthog to Knockando’ on a whim. I looked up and saw the photo of me with the Knockando sign pinned to my notice board and it struck me as a great name for a blog that probably wasn’t taken. And it wasn’t.

Then Cathy decided to try to find a googlewhack using Pantperthog as one of the words and she found one. I’m not going to tell you what it is because then that would ruin the googlewhack, but if you combine ‘Pantperthog’ with a type of long-necked African animal that eats leaves and comes in reticulated skin patterns, then you’ll find it.

Interestingly when Cath combined ‘Pantperthog’ with ‘llamas’ she got four hits. There’ll be five now.

As soon as my designer buddy Matt returns to work and has a spare five minutes, I’ll get the photos scanned and melded to use as my avatar.

In other news…
I got my dividends from Sportdaq today. I earned £61499.00. That’s a 39.82% increase, which put me at number 16,615 in the charts (down from 15525 last week).

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous19/8/06 22:52

    Might I point out, that under the official googlewhack rules, both words have to be in google's online dictionary, to be a google whack. As "pantperthog" is not, it turns out this is not so much a google whack, more a pointless excercise by a wannabe geek.

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  2. Anonymous21/8/06 12:03

    Might I point out that I am NOT a wannabe geek - just someone vaguely interested in how many times Pantperthog actually appears on the web (which is surprisingly quite a lot). I never claimed it was a googlewhack - just something I found funny - but then I was misrepresented! As if I don't know the rules of googlewhack...

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  3. er...you wrote me an email with the subject line Googlewhack!
    misrepresented!

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  4. Anonymous21/8/06 15:48

    You know you both are geeky in your own individual ways. I bet you both wish you were computer geeks really too....

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  5. As if anyone really cares what a googlewhack is.... but I would just like to say, for the record, that Cathy and Jon are NOT geeky.
    Well..... Cathy isn`t, anyway.....!

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