Hovercat

[Church has ended, and I'm waiting for someone from the Music Department to arrive for a recital that was supposed to start loading in a half-hour ago. Hrmm.]

Before I started at my current job, I worked as a customer service rep for a company that sold pyrotechnics, confetti cannons, fog machines and other special effects products for the entertainment industry. For reasons I'll detail in a later post (maybe) business at "the fireworks stand" was slow. Really slow. By the time I finally left the company it was like 2-3 sales a day slow.

Lack of business left me with a lot of free time on my hands during the work day, time I filled by playing games with the Internet. (Not on, with; there's a subtle yet important difference there.) I started with the old standards: vanity surfing, looking up old classmates and girlfriends, and posting nonsense to Unsenet.

During the course of my surfing, stalking and posting, I became a big fan of Google's ability to return a result for just about anything I could think to type into its search box. So, on one particulary slow day, I played my first game of what I now call Hovercat.

The rules are simple: Pick a word or a phrase that, as far as you know, is completely meaningless. Feed it to Google. Hit "I'm feeling lucky," and see what comes up. Of course, the first time I played I used "Hovercat," because, as far as I knew, there was no such thing. The result I got back wasn't the one I've linked to here, but it was similar and I like the animated version a lot better.

From that first result I was hooked. I played Hovercat obsessively for a week at least, and posted some of my more interesting finds to a.r.k. I went from searching regular English words to making up words to just pounding on the keyboard at random. I got a lot of junk results, domain names bought up by web speculators and seeded with pages of random search terms, but I also found a lot of interesting, unique and unintentionally funny content that I would have never even thought to look for on purpose. In a way, it was like dumpster diving the internet, finding little forgotten treasures buried in online catalogs, weblogs and discussion groups.

I still play Hovercat, though not nearly as much now that I have a job that actually involves my doing some work during the day. The FCC gigs are good Hovercatting time, though, especially a day like today when I find myself just waiting around for a group to arrive and load in. Try it yourself, and remember: keep your buttered side up!