Monday 15th May 2006

I was in Manchester today and met my friend Athena Caramitsos, the tiny infant faced Greek. The humorous (for me, and me alone) development in her life is that she never used to get any results, or ‘hits’ if she typed her own name into Google, but now there’s one result, from this site, that simply describes her as ‘the tiny infant faced Greek from Manchester’. That’s now her internet CV! Try this for yourself by typing her name into the search bar in Google.

I was elated and proud that if anyone, a potential employer or boyfriend perhaps, types her name, which is Athena Caramitsos, into Google then they’ll see her described as a tiny infant faced Greek child from Manchester.

How does Google work? Is it the case that the more hits a particular page gets, the higher it will rate with the evil geniuses at Google and the higher up the results page it gets? Please someone let me know, because I want to somehow devise a routine that means that if anyone types Athena Caramitsos in Google in the future, they’ll get a plethora of results all describing her as a tiny, infant faced Greek woman-child. It would be nice to get some variation in, such as perhaps calling her a ‘semi midget nano-being’, but all must refer to the fact she’s a thirty year old woman who looks like an eight year old girl.

Also, it would be much better if the results for Athena Caramitsos, the infant faced semi-tall dwarf, came from different sites. Therefore if you have your own website or Blog, why not mention Athena Caramitsos now and again, but making sure to make reference to her insane height directly after her name and therefore allow it to be displayed on the Google search results.

If there was just a series of 456 results for ‘Athena Caramitsos’, but all came from different pages of this site, people might wrongly assume I’m obsessed with Athena Caramitsos, and whilst I like her very much and appreciate her friendship this ISN’T the case no matter what anyone says. So what I’m saying is basically try to get her name onto as many internet sites as possible, followed by a reference to her size. Don’t do your actual job all day, make this your new job.

Also, computer nerds, if you write ‘Athena Caramitsos the infant faced semi-woman child dwarf’ several times on one web page, which is clearly what I’m attempting here, does that page get higher up the results board than others that simply refer to Athena Caramitsos as a infant faced tiny half-person once? Please advise me on this.

You might think it’s cruel to be referring to one of my oldest and best friends in this way but trust me – she just loves the attention. She’ll be loving this page when she reads it. Laughing through the tears.

She joined me at a comedy club called The Frog And Bucket tonight where they have a night called ‘Beat The Frog’. What happens is they get a couple of ‘established’ acts up to do about ten minutes each to get the audience warmed up, and I was one of these, before an interval and then a terrifying game for new acts, or ‘open spots’ as they’re referred to in he business, who get up and try and do five minutes. However, the compere, who tonight was the excellent Jason Cook, has given three audience members big cards, and if they think the act’s rubbish they can hold up their card and as soon as all three are raised the act is brought off the stage as that Beck song ‘You’re a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me’ plays. I didn’t explain that very well did I?

It’s a cruel way of doing things, but very entertaining. A couple of the acts were really good. I think five out of eight survived the five minutes. If you’re thinking of starting out in stand-up, I wouldn’t advise you to do competitions like this, it could knock your confidence forever. But the problem is, everyone seems to want to be a stand-up comedian these days and perhaps these nights are necessary to weed out the rubbish from the quite rubbish. I didn’t have to go through all this when I started out, thank the Lord. There were open spots of course, everyone has to do those, but I can’t remember it being quite as humiliating as it was for a couple of acts tonight. Mind you, they hadn’t written any funny jokes or ideas so maybe they got what they deserved? Yes, actually they did.

But Athena Caramitsos the tiny, infant faced, woman child, semi-midget dwarf elf really enjoyed it and so that’s the main thing.

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