Monday, April 09, 2007

Joshua Bell Gay. Or Married. Or Straight

Joshua Bell Gay. Why are so many of you obsessed with this, this Joshua Bell Gay? I write a blog entry over a year ago about this talented fiddler with the phrase, “tell Wife you’re gay, even though you’re not” and a year later, this entry still gets plenty hits from people Googling “Joshua bell gay.”

From the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America. Why? Are you gay and want to know if he’s available? Are you a woman who wants to marry Joshua Bell? Are you a jealous husband who wants to crush your spouse’s hopes forever of divorcing you and running off with Mr. Bell and his “Strad”?

I don't know if Joshua Bell is gay, and I don't care. You won’t find the answer to your query here. Despite all the many new “viewers” Bookfraud has gotten from people doing a search with the phrase “joshua bell gay,” there is no information here on this. Or “Joshua bell straight,” either.

The most frequent search term that lands people here is not “bookfraud brilliant or “great writer" or “why hasn't bookfraud been published and gotten millions of dollars?" It's you-know-what. It's not “Tchaikovsky gay” or “Horowitz gay,” even though I've written about these two musical geniuses, and who were certainly homosexual.

In fact, nobody Googles “Itzhak Perlman gay” or “Sarah Chang gay” or “Jascha Heifetz gay” or “Paganini gay.” What gives?

Also, there seems to be a lot of people who are looking for Padma Lakshmi's picture. There must be a lack of photographs for Ms. Lakshmi, whose tenuous connection to this space is that she is bethrothed to Salman Rushdie, perhaps the greatest writer in English these days. OK, here she is, with Salman, again proving that despite all the death threats, he's the luckiest man in the world:

A lot of people visited this space after my entry on the Cubs was posted on a few baseball blogs (though, given the number of comments, you wouldn’t have known it). Long after the interest over the Cubs fades, though, you’ll get people who will come via searching the Internet for “Joshua Bell Gay.”

Please let me know why you're doing this. You know who you are. Not that there's anything wrong.