1045 A Table

Saturday, December 30, 2006

I got the call, we've got a table for New Year's Eve. Yeah!

Longer term, I'd like to find a center table for the living room. Either something lowish that will match the Renaissance Revival stuff, or dining table height that's small but expandable. A few weeks ago "check out this wonderful table!" was going around blogs and emails - the DB Fletcher capstan table. Much too large and much much much too expensive. On Antiques Roadshow today, there was a smaller one - just the right size, and only one much into too expensive.

So I got to thinking, gee, seems like there ought to be modern versions of the smaller capstan table out there. You know, like from Sears. It would be ideal for breakfast rooms, family rooms, and "Florida rooms", and have the advantage that you don't have to store and drag out the extensions. You could even make the table cheaply with formica-like finish, and metal workings (not that I'd want formica, but that would be a good start toward reasonableness).

So I Googled "capstan table" -fletcher. I found one modern version, large, for "only" $23,394, and that was all. All others are a) antique, b) in England, and c) equally expensive. I did find some plans for building your own, but apparently nobody's building any .... or at least they're not selling them.

I found something very interesting in the above search results. When you get into the fourth or fifth page of hits, you get stuff like this (I broke the links so you won't get hurt):

http://www.privivka.net/archives/amoxicillin-..etc.
Toodle-oo, The bargemen shoved an unasserted renunciable convocations savourless quadrillion themselves. An capstan table a subantarctic familiarly bromised ...

Lots and lots of hits that look like they were composed by a gobbledygook generator. Know what? They are! They were almost all sites selling cheap prescription drugs. They find out what words get searched for a lot, and then fill the site with those words. It's called keyword spamming. The worst ones consist of just a list of every word in the dictionary. I didn't expect to see them so high in the search order, because I can't imagine anyone ever actually clicking on them, but - I guess "capstan table" is not a very common term, so there weren't very many valid hits.
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