I have been beating my head against a proverbial wall with Search Engine Optimization and WordPress E-Commerce integration in my efforts to try to get a bit of income flowing from my websites. In the course of doing so, I went over to Technorati to stake a “claim” on this blog for The Greater Glory of Shady Enterprises…

Technorati, not to be confused with Blotterati, actually gets heavy web traffic as the premiere clearinghouse for the so-called blogosphere. It will track blogs and chart endless statistics on which topics are trending and which are not. It will also tell you if your obscure little blog out on the hinterlands of cyberspace has gotten any recognition whatsoever, but Google Analytics is really a better way to track that info.

Anyway, in the midst of roaming around Technorati I saw that “Jesse James” was among the trending topics. “Jesse James?!? Ya mean like the outlaw bandit from Missouri who, depending on your perspective, was either a post-Civil War anti-hero or a murderous racist scalliwag?” Well, no, as it turns out, not THAT Jesse James. And what a shame, because I would have had some interest in learning why he was suddenly trending on Technorati.

Turns out there’s a custom chopper celebrity Jesse James who went to an Arizona sex rehab, had an orgy and posed as a Nazi. Or something like that. Who can be certain of the details? Or be bothered to care? How disappointly typical of these modern times!

I have more than a passing interest in the outlaw Jesse James though. As a child my maternal grandmother told my family that we were related to Daniel Boone. The family went out to the Daniel Boone home and signed into the guest book and was, apparently, able to trace the actual lineage. Not to be outdone, my maternal grandfather began propagating the story that we were also related to Jesse James, on his side of the family. He had no proof to bolster his claim, of course, but lack of evidence made his claim no less attractive.

In the more than thirty years that have passed since I first heard him tell this tale, I’ve had to wonder if there was any factual basis to the claim or if he just disliked the idea that his wife had ties to Daniel Boone and that he needed a wild claim of his own. If memory serves me right, his mother’s maiden name was James and we lived in Missouri, where the James Gang was known to hide out in the caves, but beyond that, I don’t have a clue if he was just pulling our leg.

One strange serendipity that I encountered a few years ago is that there was a book called The Life, Times and Treacherous Death of Jesse James edited by a Joseph Snell of the Kansas State Historical Society. And a quick Google of Jesse James and Snell informs me that the screenplay for Roy Rogers’ The Days of Jesse James had a screenplay written by an Earle Snell. Snell was my grandfather’s last name.

Hard to say if I’ll ever definitively know if I’m related to Jesse James, but, in the immortal words of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, “it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”