Last Tuesday afternoon (where does the time go?) Oolong got her toenails stuck in the mesh of the Finsterium. After being threatened by the Evil Hand Of Evil Catching, she managed to wriggle herself free. But the mishap proved that it had been far too long since we've caught all the birds to trim their nails. So Tuesday night, armed with the Green Net Of Evil Catching, and the Flashlight Of Evil Looking, Bruce caught them all so I could give them a nice pedicure. Oolong was first, and got all her nails lightly trimmed. The rest of the Finsters didn't need such a drastic procedure. Mostly, they needed their back toenails on each foot seriously trimmed, and maybe one or two others. Szechwan (Pepper) clearly learned a thing or two from the late Earl Grey, since he stayed hiding in a nest box during the whole Catching Event. Bruce got him too, though; his toenails hardly needed any trimming at all.

I have to say, the whole bird catching and toenail trimming process is much easier when you only have five of them! I put Szechwan (Pepper) back into the Finsterium directly after his trim, but I paused just long enough to take a picture before I put the rest of the Finsters back home.

They're all beautiful now.

Interestingly, the phrase "long toenails" is the one that most often gets this blog discovered by search engines. In 2006, "long toenails" brought up this blog 939 times; it represents 18.8% of all search "keyphrases" from the year, and the next most popular phrase only represents 1.9% of all searches.

But it's more interesting than that. Let's look at January, 2007 in a bit more detail. During that month, the search phrase "long toenails" hit this blog 99 times; the next most popular phrase came in at 23. However, the full list of keyphrases is even more telling: "long toenail" got 9 hits, "very long toenails" got 5 hits, "long toe nails" got 3, and "very long toenail" got 2. The following phrases each got one hit during January, making a grand total of 125 people interested in long toenails:
   • toenail piercing
   • ;long toenails
   • long-toenails
   • picture long toenail
   • toenail long
   • pretty long toenails
   • long toenails and beckham

Now, when I looked up the phrase "long toenails" on Google, The Finster Log showed up somewhere around 300. Nobody is really "finding" the blog that way. But if you look it up on Google Images, guess what shows up at number 4 right now? A photo I took of Nutmeg after she'd died, because I was sad about her, and she had such interesting long nails. The original photo is much bigger (but just as skewed to the red): click to see Nutmeg's very long toenails (pops).

But when people search for "long toenails" on Google, they're probably looking for something more along the lines of "long toenails and beckham" than pictures of bird's toes. I have purposely not included a link to a direct Google search, since many people consider long toenails on (mostly) women to be very attractive, if you know what I mean: wink wink, nudge nudge. Do your own search, people! And turn off SafeSearch Filtering to get the full effect. You know, if you want to.

Whatever your preferences, my guess is that the 100-plus people who may actually have discovered this blog last month looking for "long toenails" were probably not expecting Nutmeg.

Surprise!

Not sure why I think that's so funny, but I do. And this entry will just reinforce those search results. Tee hee. Hope I haven't disappointed anybody too much!