Hey, remember that thing I used to do, where I would pay Google back for misdirecting a wayward searcher to my blog by answering after the fact the question that led them here in the first place? Yeah, Google Penance is so 2007*, but for old time’s sake, I thought I’d dash off a quicky. To the poor Googler who made the oddly specific search for “a sequence of events for the Middle ages a flow chart that tells about the events that happend during the Middle ages such as the famous people and famous inventions that they made“, here’s the best medieval timeline on the web that I know of. I’m sorry that Google brought you to my archive for articles from September of 2008, oh anonymous Googler.
Oh, and though I’ve not done any Google Penances lately, while we’re on the subject, there’s a much cooler iteration of the idea now going on over at my friends’ blog, Satisfactory Comics. Mike and Isaac do me one better by creating Doodle Penances,” wherein they take turns sketching their misdirected Google searches. This is my favorite so far, made by Isaac in response to a search for “werewolf the apocalypse comics panels”:
According to the Satisfactory Ones, this panel is composed of three luminaries:
First, our former Yale colleague Matthew Giancarlo, whose lycanthropy was in full evidence because of the phase of the moon; second, Obsidian 20-Jaguar, the physical embodiment of the looming Aztec apocalypse of 2012; third and finally, the cartoon version of Scott McCloud. (The real Scott McCloud was unavailable.)
That’s exactly the sort of Scott McCloud joke that I wish I’d written. Sadly, he doesn’t come up much here, and I couldn’t draw him if he did, anyway.
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*The real reason I don’t do these as often is that as this blog has become more popular, they have gotten a lot harder to do, since the interesting incoming links in my sitemeter cycle out more quickly. I’ll have to upgrade to a professional meter solution, if I want to catch all the weird stuff that brings people here.