It's times like this, in the wee hours of the morning when I've woken up with a throat full of stomach acid (apparently, having a mere ice cream cone two hours before bedtime does indeed fall afoul of doctor's orders to wait four hours after eating) that I marvel at the intricacies of causality.

Once upon a time, I put up a page of mottoes up on my Web site. Once upon a different time, I partook in a promotional Webgame for a science fiction movie (though "game" does little justice to the experience). For a few years, I'd been suffering from intense heartburn, and occasionally woken up gagging on acid — both of which had been slowly but steadily increasing in frequency. Google released a toolbar for Internet Explorer.

Four wholly unconnected things, one might think.

Then one day, I checked my Web site's referrer logs. There were a couple of hits on my mottoes page, coming from one particular site. I followed the link back to the source, and in doing so, unknowingly tied those four unconnected things together.

I found myself at the weblog of Moira, who had Googled the phrase "De parvis grandis a cervus erit", the motto displayed by the Google toolbar.

I read a few entries of her weblog — my first experience with the blogging phenomenon — and discovered that she, too, had participated in "The Beast" (which was the name by which the A.I. Web promotion came to be known).

I emailed her on a lark — The Beast had just ended, and it was kind of neat to have run across, quite by accident, someone else who'd played it. We had a pleasant "conversation" over email, and I continued reading her blog, which I found interesting.

Then, one day, she wrote about GERD, Gastro-Esophagal Reflux Disease, and I discovered that the heartburn and rude awakenings could eventually end up destroying my vocal cords.

I'm a singer. Singing is very important to me. Losing a finger and being unable to play lute, guitar, recorder, sax, keyboards — that I could live with (though if Django Reinhardt could play that well with only two usable fingers on his left hand, maybe not all hope would be lost), but losing my voice would be devastating.

So I went to the doctor, changed my eating and sleeping habits, gave up pretty much all the food I enjoyed (caffeine, Indian food, fried foods, habañero sauce as a general condiment). And I only cheat a little. (Ordering mild or medium murgh makhanwala, instead of extra-hot, is a small price to pay for keeping my voice.)

So why am I writing all of this, and boring you to death?

While waiting for the ranitidine and Tums to take effect so I can go back to bed this morning, I checked my referrer logs and discovered that someone had hit my blog from a search engine, reading both entries that contained the phrase they were looking for: choking on stomach acid. Neither entry contained any links to information about GERD.

So this post is an attempt to rectify that oversight, as well as to express the thoughts that I have pretty much every time I dwell on what might have been if Google had chosen another motto, or Moira hadn't played The Beast or been curious about small things making a large pile, or I hadn't read my referrer logs that day.

So thank you, Google. Thank you, Steven Spielberg, Amblin Entertainment, and (irony of ironies) Microsoft. And last but definitely not least, thank you, Moira.