Woody Is a Doll

In the run-up to tomorrow's big election, I've been monitoring site activity to watch how many hits the Curmudgeon's Guide gets (which, by the way, see, if it's not too late!). Usually folks come here having looked for some form of the search string "conservative voters guide," and manage to find the Woundup in the process. Some folks even stick around for a bit and actually read the Guide. I thank you for even considering my opinion while forming your own.

Every once in awhile, though, this blog is visited due to some rather, oh, peculiar search strings that have little or nothing to do with politics. I do still get searches for "montebello hoax," meaning that school teachers are still assigning students to write about the incident wherein a Mexican flag was flown over an inverted American flag during a protest at Montebello High School a few years ago. Sorry, teachers, it really happened. That fact has simply been too well documented to insist on calling it a "hoax." Blame for that incident is still widely disputed, but not the incident itself. Back to your social engineering blackboards with you.

The search that caught my eye today, though, was "how to fix Woody's head." It is a question that has, I confess, triggered a primordial response deep within my psyche.

First, of course, there's the obvious fact that I was completely unaware that my head was in need of fixing. Not that various liberals and alternative religionists haven't gently suggested such a thing in the past. My comments section is chock-full of folks who somehow question my intelligence. But even when they do, they never imply that my head needs fixing. Re-educating, yes. They universally seem to agree that I need serious re-educating. But not fixing.

Then I looked to the source of the question. The chap (we'll assume a male of the species for strictly generic purposes) is based in India, or at least was using the India version of Google, so there may be something of a language barrier at play. I spent time in Guatemala some thirty years ago, and the local Mayan dialect used the question "is your face good?" to ask whether you were, in fact, feeling fine. "Good my face," I would reply (although not, obviously, in English) which seemed to satisfy local custom. Perhaps "fix head" is, in one of the Indian dialects, an indicator of bad taste, as in "you would better appreciate this snake stew if your head weren't broken."

But, no, I have long known about my blog's title and its uncomfortable similarity to "Woody's Round-up" which figured so prominently in "Toy Story II." Now, I have every admiration for Pixar and their writing teams, and I picked the name "Woody's Woundup" as (I thought) a clever play on my long-standing nickname and the allusion to Toy Story, but which could also be interpreted as my being constantly "wound up" about something or other (meaning politics). Hence I get visited by numerous folks — primarily in Japan for some reason — who are looking for information on the Round-up. Google's infamous search engine uses that fabulous proximity logic of theirs and sends them here. Thanks, Google!

Hence, in the final analysis I'm forced to conclude that this individual was actually concerned with the state of Woody's head, meaning that he has a Woody doll from the movie, and has somehow broken the poor thing's melon. It is a tragedy, to be sure, and one for which I hope this person finds immediate relief. After all, a cow may be sacred in India, but who knows what significance a Woody doll may have?