I needed to get this out of my head. Sorry for the ugly.

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I start worrying about Halloween around March of each year, building up lists of possible costumes which I will later ignore, invariably coming up with some new idea in the last week. Recently Japan has caused some interference with my costumery, but I am quite proud of the last two costumes I had:

Inspector Gadget Costume 2004

Here I am as Inspector Gadget. By the way, if you needed the explanation of the previous sentence, please leave this blog and never come back. Thanks. This was an absurdly popular costume in New York in 2004. I had folks leaning out of cab windows to sing the theme song more than once. And no one can deny the intensity of Gadget’s sex appeal.

Jareth the Golbin King Costume

This one is a bit tougher. I’m supposed to be Jareth, the goblin king from Labyrinth, as portrayed by David Bowie. Many people had trouble figuring this one out, but drunk New Yorkers are in a better mood than usual on Halloween, and I got a few, “I love Rod Stewart!” exclamations, and my favorite: “Oh my god! It’s Jon Bon Jovi from Labyrinth!”

I am the first to admit that neither of these costumes is all that well-executed, but they were unexpected and tapped into some serious nostalgia. Er, anyway, rigid collodion…

This year I wanted to do something that would take advantage of my longer hair. I figured it was a toss-up between Hansel from Zoolander and Heath Ledger’s Joker, and I made a commitment to the latter, and I’m starting to think it wasn’t the greatest idea.

Rigid collodion is a liquid that simulates scars. It pulls together the skin as it dries, giving the look of an old cut, something every Heath Ledger Joker needs. I head over to Google Products, née Froogle and find that every supplier is out of stock. I’m sure sales of rigid collodion pick up this time of year, but seriously?! This is not a good sign.

Next, I head over to Amazon and search for rigid collodion. Turns out there’s none to be found, but there is this:

Searching for rigid collodion on Amazon

Let’s see, I asked for a piece of stage makeup kit and am shown none. Instead, I see Joker makeup kits, green vests, purple suits. Bad, bad, bad!

My concern is not so much that I can’t find collodion, as I can always just use liquid latex. But it makes me wonder where all of the collodion has gone to. All signs point to an enormous glut of Jokers next Friday. I am not going to change my plans, but I figure mentioning this ahead of time gives me some claim of priority:

“Oh, the Joker? How original.”
“Yes, I knew they would all be here. That’s why I planned ahead not to suck.”

Update: Success, I think. Rigid collodion courtesy of ebay. It’s a lot of fun to play with but doesn’t leave your face in the best shape.

From Joker

Generic Green Mouthwash

Hideous, no?

I considered a few options, such as a decanter, and hoped that I would find something decent-looking at Muji, but no. There are plenty of lovely ways to show off your hand soap, but nothing really appropriate for mouthwash. After complaining about the issue to my friend Ben, he said, “How about a bottle of Maker’s Mark?” Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that before? My bottle of Maker’s Mark was only half-empty, and though I love a challenge, I wasn’t quite up to the task. Fortunately, I had an empty bottle of Jack Daniels sitting around. Behold!

Classy Mouthwash in Jack Daniels Bottle

How awesome is that? I have to imagine it’s an excellent conversation piece, except that I have already raved about this to anyone who might actually use my bathroom. Plus, I get to “pretend” to be a complete degenerate every morning when I take a swig from a bottle of JD. Sometimes I even bring it into the shower with me. It can be hard to start the day.

The main limitation here is that you have to use brown mouthwash, the flavor of carbonated bile. I suppose that makes some people feel clean. Ben’s wife, Lucy, suggested using a Bombay Sapphire bottle and the far more palatable blue mouthwash. But I don’t want to break the illusion, and I don’t know anyone who drinks gin from a bottle. I’m sure you’re out there, though, and are a lovely person.

For extra classiness points, I recommend leaving the bottle on the toilet tank. With the seat raised, of course:

Mouthwash Jack Daniels Bottle on Toilet

But, the man is a dead ringer for Lex Luthor, arch enemy of superman. This would put him on the wrong side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, which is not where one wants a cabinet member to be. Check it out:

OK, not twins separated at birth, but there is a bit of a resemblance. Also, both men are billionaire financiers who achieved high positions within public service (Lex: president, Hank: cabinet), and I can only assume that Luthor ran as a Republican. As a point of contrast, Lex Luthor was a mad scientist until being reinvented as a financier in the 80s, while I understand that Paulson was a English major.

See also John Edwards = John Ritter

Update: In recent days, I am beginning to reconsider the stamement “I don’t have too many problems with Henry Paulson,” but he is probably doing what Lex would do in this situation.

While in England recently, my friend informed me of the exceptional childhood of Gordon Brown, who was chosen at an early age for an experimental, accelerated learning program. “You mean like Ender?!” Indeed, Gordon Brown’s childhood appears to be modeled off of that of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, which-came-first aside. Consider the following, which might as well be from Gordon’s Game:

When he arrived at university in 1967, he was just 16, having been fast tracked in a pioneering scheme for the brightest pupils. He had succeeded at just about everything he had tried, whether in the classroom or on the sports pitch. But after two terms at university he was left lying in bed in a darkened hospital room, both eyes covered in patches, unable to move or read. The retina in his left eye was detached…

I believe this makes Gordon a bit duller than Ender, but it’s a high bar to meet. On the other hand, I don’t think Ender even attended college, so we’ll call it a wash.

In many schools, the pupil who is consistently top of the form, or teacher’s pet, would often be targeted by bullies. But Gordon won over the boys because he was a precocious talent on the sports field.

Replace “sports field” with “Battle Room” and “precocious talent” with “precision weapon,” and there you have it. And finally:

After becoming leader of Britain’s Labour Party in June of 2007, [Brown] stripped off his Battle Suit, went to his bunk, and wept: for the little boy who had left Kirkcaldy so long ago, for the monster that had replaced him, and for civilisations lost…

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I highly recommend the book Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. It’s science fiction, which is not everyone’s favorite genre, but even my friends who only read Real Literature have enjoyed it. Just replace “Ender” with “Gordon.”

I have attempted to mimic British “spelling” in this post. Let me know if I failed.

David Barton Gym Skull Door Handles

Although they are harder to operate than the aforementioned lame library handles, the skulls are undeniably cooler. It’s not clear where one is supposed to grab them, but I stick my hand in the eye sockets, which is how I usually open bisected skulls.

In fact, they remind me an awful lot of Castle Grayskull, by whose power Price Adam turned himself into He-Man. If it’s good enough to turn the effeminate ruler of Eternia into The Most Powerful Man in the Universe, it’ll work for me.

Castle Grayskull

In my random polling, no one is quite sure why they were installed, but I have a theory. The David Barton Gym in Chelsea has a largely male membership. Most members are men’s men, this being Chelsea. In fact, the gym used to be the YMCA, rated highly by construction workers, police officers, and Native Americans. Now, the whole place has the feel of an upscale gay nightclub, with dim accent lighting, Red Bull, and a DJ booth. This is not really my scene, but it is a fine gym nonetheless. My theory is that the skulls are intended to scare away what few women still attend David Barton Gym. From interviewing the only female member I know, I can confirm that the plan is working.

Introduction, and a Bit About Methodology

I work at Google, but I’m speaking only for myself here, not for Google. To be honest, anyone with decent search engine skills could figure this out on their own. I just happen to have a close working relationship with the Internet.

First, some terminology. When you see a URL such as “http://www.andrewchatham.com/blog/”, the host for the website is everything before between the 2nd and 3rd slash, “www.andrewchatham.com” in this case. The top-level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the host. In this case, .com is the TLD, but there are also country-specific TLDs, so that the TLD for “www.google.fr” is .fr, indicating France. There are about 250 valid TLDs, most of them country-specific. Here you can find a list of country-specific TLDs.

Each country controls its own registration process, and they have vastly different requirements, so that a website with a domain from a certain country doesn’t necessarily operate in that country. For example, the tiny nation of Tuvalu — which has population of ten thousand and which may soon be underwater — sold off the rights to .tv to another company, which then sells domains such as “sports.tv”.

At Google, one of the projects I’ve worked on is our crawler, a very large program which downloads a copy of the Internet. I therefore have access to some better statistics than you could find publicly. I used these numbers to identify the countries with the smallest web presence, but you can approximately verify the results using the search engine itself. Google’s “site:” operator returns only results matching a given site, and it can also be used on top-level domains, so that a search for [site:.com] shows around 5 billion web pages hosted on .com. These estimates can be quite inaccurate, but they’re public and they roughly correlate with the private numbers, so I’ll refer to them.

For the most part, crawlers work by following links, and so if I create a web page but no one ever links to it, it probably won’t ever be found by Google. Google might also be forbidden from downloading some pages by a robots.txt file. For these reasons, the numbers might be underestimates of the true number of web pages, but it doesn’t affect the conclusions.

“Large” TLDs

We’ve already seen that .com is a very popular TLD. Other well-populated TLDs include .uk, with 477 million results in Google, and .de, with 176 million.

I started looking at the size of various TLDs because I thought there couldn’t possibly be much use for the niche TLDs, .museum and .aero. I may have been wrong, as there are certainly more pages on both than I had originally thought. [site:.aero] and [site:.museum] both show about 500,000 pages, and a cursory glance says that they are actually are about airplanes and museums. That may not seem like a lot of pages, but it’s way more than we’ll see on the really unpopular TLDs, and it puts them on par with .va, the TLD for Vatican City.

Small TLDs

Among countries you’ve probably heard of, the one with the fewest web pages is Iraq. A search for [site:.iq] reveals only 702 web pages, which makes the Iraqi web presence a bit more than twice the size of my website. I understand they’ve been very busy in Iraq lately, so creating a large web presence and an easy domain registration process may be low on their list of priorities. Afghanistan, by contrast, has 116,000 pages, including those for several banks and software companies.

Compared to some lesser-known places, though, Iraq dominates the Tubes.

For the other Internet dorks out there, we have .arpa, with 135 results. .arpa is a holdover from the Primordial Internet, and I’m not sure how someone managed to get a Unicycle Blog on there, but they did. Technically, .example and .invalid are TLDs that can never have any web pages, but I’ll leave them out of consideration.

The big winner is .mh, the TLD for the Marshall Islands. It has exactly one website with a single page, http://www.nic.net.mh/, which has not been updated since 1997.

gee.um

Although it does not win first prize, second-place .um did a better job of capturing my imagination. With two web sites serving a total of seven pages, .um is the TLD for the United States Minor Outlying Islands. With a permanent population of zero, that gives .um the highest number of web pages per capita of any country-code TLD (or undefined, for you math pedants).

I had never heard of the US Minor Outlying Islands before, but I learned from their registry’s homepage that the islands were brought under US hegemony by the Guano Islands Act of 1856. I guessed that some politician must have had the unfortunate name of Guano, but it was not so. In fact, the US took control of these islands so that we could harvest bird poop. Most importantly, the US has permission to use military intervention to defend said bird poop from invaders. According to the Guano Act, a US citizen can claim for the United States any uninhabited island or rock containing guano deposits, subject to the president’s discretion. This is how an unpopulated quasi-nation is born and gets its Internet on.

Update: Alas! The same day I started writing this post, they decided to cancel the .um TLD!

Note: not actually true, though she did shake her first.