Celebrities/Naked: The Search Destroyers

There are no naked celebrities on this page so feel free to click away if you reached this blog by mistake. No hard feelings.

Two weeks ago Roger Ebert wrote about the brilliant little SiteMeter he put on his blog — take a look at the bottom of this page if you haven't seen one yet. I had a SiteMeter before his post, so I was stoked to read his comments, which reinforced the little gadget's curious skills. The little green button links to its home base, where it tracks visitors to this page. It catalogs their visit: how long they stayed, where they came from and where they left to. It's completely anonymous except for a little blip that will appear on a world map indicating where the click originated, be it northeast Phoenix or Norway. One list on SiteMeter, called referrals, shows the page the visitor was on when they clicked onto this page. Sometimes the pre-PickupFlix page is a Yahoo or Google search. Incidentally, SiteMeter has a funny little trick to its cataloging: it preserves the original search criteria of the visitor. So not only can I see that they visited my site, but that they clicked into it after searching for "Humphrey Bogart movies" or "great cop flicks." Or maybe the occasional "Marisa Tomei nude."

Yes, there are lots of people looking for porn on the net. Apparently some get sent to my page which is 100 percent porn-free. I first noticed this lost-porn-surfer phenomenon after naming a non-nude photo of Vanessa Hudgens "tween," which sent droves of assistant principals to this page to see Miss Hudgens sans clothes. Creepy indeed. (I've since renamed the photo, by the way.) One variation on the "tween" search was "tweens nude," which my blog was able to keep up with since, three posts before the one with Hudgens, I had used the word "nude" to describe a plot element in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. Yahoo and Google have a hard time analyzing the distance between searched words apparently, so as long as "nude" and "(insert your favorite female celebrity's name here)" appear on the same page it counts them as if they appeared in the same sentence.

The phenomenon came up again after running a piece on rapper and pop superstar M.I.A., less commonly known as Mathangi Arulpragasam. She played the 2007 Vegoose music festival, where I was photographing her. Shortly after her set (like 2 seconds) I decided she was the hottest thing on the planet. I'm sidetracking, but I write that only to underscore her abilities to charm men out of their socks. Anyway, the piece ran last December, yet every week I get a lovely array of Mathangi Arulpragasam searches. Here's a small cross section of some of the searches: "MIA topless," "MIA nip slip," "MIA sex video," "MIA bra flash," "MIA crotch shot," and all kinds of variations of "MIA nude" and "MIA naked," because apparently there's a difference. Now, let me again clarify something: It would be delightful to see M.I.A. naked, but until M.I.A. actually comes to my door to remove her clothing for a visual inspection by me then I'm going to assume that she does not want me to see her in nothing but her skin. So I just kinda skip the internet treasure hunt for Mathangi Arulpragasam nip slips and sex videos.

That, of course, doesn't stop hundreds of others who cozy up in front of their computers to begin their nightly searches of "Megan Fox lesbian video" or "Zooey Deschanel no panties." Curiously, I've yet to have anyone land on Pick-Up Flix after they've searched for "Laura Dern nip slips," "Kathy Bates hot tub video" or "Christina Aguilera breastfeeding in clown makeup." And, yes, I realize that by including these searchable phrases in this text that I'm increasing the chances of random porn seekers landing on this page instead of their beloved nude sites. It doesn't matter because they stopped reading a long time ago; in fact, they stopped reading as soon as they didn't see any "Jenna Fischer see-through dress" photos, which would be rad but, alas, they don't exist. Yet.

But going back to M.I.A., if I had to talk about a winner this summer it would be her. She didn't release a movie, or even a new album, but her "Paper Planes" in the Pineapple Express trailer was brilliant on a level that I have yet to define in any sort of articulate way. I loved the video and its catchy song so much that I sorta regretted watching the movie when I could have just watched the trailer again.