For a while I wanted to cause Google to disassociate my name with this web site. It is not as if this site is top secret, but I have never prominently featured my name on the site because I wanted some distance between my professional and personal personas. I asked a couple people who link to this site to remove my name from the "a" tag, but that seemingly had little effect on Google. The only thing that worked in the end was a couple of Apache directives:
# Turn Googlebot away from "https://goatee.net/" which is the target of the bomb
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} .*Googlebot.*
RewriteRule .* - [G]
# Anyone coming to my site having looked for my name gets an error
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*(reagle|joseph).*
RewriteRule .* - [G]
I often spend a couple of afternoon hours at my local library reading and writing. I know most all of the librarians and Paul is particularly friendly, almost overly so. He notes the books Nora and I request from the other branches and tells us what has arrived as soon as we enter. Or, if Nora hasn't been in for a couple days to pick her books up, he will ask about her. He's noted my interest in theology and will hold books for me that I might like. Sometimes he is right on. We share an interest in certain Catholic writers (e.g., Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton) and I appreciated that he had kept the newly arrived An Infinity of Little Hours about life in a pre-Vatican II Carthusian chapter house. People often donate used books, which Paul sometimes sets aside for me as well; these tend to be more suspect: wacky New Age spirituality books people no longer want. The most recent donated book was The Spiritual Tourist: a Personal Odyssey through the Outer Reaches of Belief. I found this to be a frustrating, and sad, account of the fruits of interaction between the Western search for meaning and the East's supply of superstition and gurus. It includes many of the bizarre beliefs of and attributions to Sathya Sai Baba, Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, Kamala Reddy; the sexual escapades of Ch°yam Trungpa and Sogyal Rinpoche; and the odd story of the Theosophical Society including H.P. Blavatsky and C.W. Leadbeater's discovery of Krishnamurti and rise of the cult of the "Masters."
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