Atherton Family Notes

When we went to Chicago this summer, we took Tiphaine on a long stroll down Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute of Chicago.  As we walked north from there towards the river, just across the street from the Wrigley building, we encountered an interesting tribute to one of the most famous paintings in the AIC, American Gothic, Grant Wood’s enigmatic tribute to American life.  (Wikipedia’s article on the painting is well worth a read, if you are not familiar with the painting’s history.)

The 25-foot-tall statue on Michigan Avenue is called God Bless America, and has been there since December 2008.  The installation is apparently only temporary, but it has been very popular among tourists during its brief stay.

In a full size picture of the statue, you can see that the famous rural duo have become quite the world travelers.  It was very crowded around the statue when we were there, however, so I couldn’t make a stereogram of the whole thing without getting a lot of tourists in the shot as well.

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This story is funny enough that I have to pass it along.

I used to occasionally visit a blog by a graduate law student who wrote about items of current interest in the law for non-lawyers like myself.  Outside of the main topic of his blog, he would occasionally post lists of weird Google searches that caused hits on his blog.  Some of them were very funny, and others made you wonder about the combined sanity of the human race.  It has inspired me to check on the incoming searches that leads to this blog, but normally, these searches are very benign — searches for scrapbooking stuff, or about the cricket, etc.

In the last few weeks we’ve started seeing some traffic for a very strange web query.  Our blog doesn’t generate very many random hits mainly because it isn’t a general interest blog.  For the most part, only people who know us visit this page.

There are a few exceptions, though.  Our page about making 3D snowflakes continues to be the most popular page on the site and is visited by people from around the world.  More recently, some of the stereograms I have posted have drawn a few hits due to some small popularity of this type of photograph on the web.

And that’s where it starts to get weird.  Back in June, I added a short article about our visit to the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 2002.  In the entry, I described it as “this strange cock-eyed building” and I included a stereogram I made of the tower.  This phrase turns out to be, um, meaningful to some cadre of Google users.

The search phrase they are using that leads to this blog is:  ”stereogram cock.”

Our blog shows up as the number one image hit in all of Googleland for these keywords.  I didn’t include a link to this search because some of the other results of this search can be — shall we say — disturbing if you don’t have Google safe search turned on.

What is really odd is that we have gotten 49 clicks on that article in the last month through someone (or someones) being directed here by Google when this phrase has been entered.

I shudder to think what they might have really been looking for – and why they wanted to see it in 3D.

On the other hand, the search does bring up this nice stereogram of a rooster.

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We’ve been to the Indianapolis Museum of Art several times recently… In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve been to the museum as many times since in the last year as I have in the entire time that I’ve lived in Indianapolis before that — approximately 20 years.

Part of the reason for this was Tiphaine’s visit this summer.  The museum is a great place to take a visitor, so it was a no-brainer to add that to her itinerary.  So the girls and I took her there on a Sunday afternoon while Sandi was helping to set up the photography exhibit at the state fair.

Despite the fact that Carissa, Celia and Sadie got pretty restless inside the museum while we were there, they loved wandering on the grounds.  The visit reminded me of how many nice areas on the museum grounds there are to take pictures, so we recently made another trip to the museum for Sandi to scout locations where she can take people for photography sessions.

The stereogram below was taken during that scouting trip on the mall on the Oldfields estate that comprises much of the grounds of the museum.  Sandi and the girls thought it would be funny to recreate the statue by the fountain.

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