I used to have a web stats tracker that told me when people found my homepage on a search engine. Month after month, I found piles of search engine hits from people searching for Rachel Welsh. Presumably, my site came up because my name is Rachel and I have Welsh corgis; I'm sure the searchers were sorely disappointed. So, I put up a page to ask the world a question: who the heck is Rachel Welsh, and why was everyone searching for her?

My stated hypothesis was that perhaps people were searching for Raquel Welch, but I didn't know why so many people would be searching for an actress who is so, um, not up-to-the-minute, shall we say, that the number of them who misspelled her name in exactly the same way and then happen to visit my page—a fraction you would think would be pretty damn small—would yield so many hits. That statement notwithstanding, a quantity of people sufficient to populate a small island nation have emailed me over the years to tell me that these folks were obviously searching for "the famous actress, Rachel Welsh," and maybe I was just too young to remember her. (Did they not read that part of the question?)