Who Is Nathan Hankins?

Longtime readers of this blog know that, by using SiteMeter, I am able to keep track of the search terms people use to find their way here. Some of those search terms have been odd and inscrutable.

Over the past week or so I have received repeated visits from somebody in Mountain View, California, someone who apparently works for Google. Although each visit lands on a different page (or blogpost), each one has the same search string:

nathan hankins sex pervert sheriff

Pursuing this search on Google does not shed much light. The first ten hits are completely unrelated and the individual words ("nathan," "hankins," "sex," "pervert," and "sheriff") do not appear near each other.

The first hit, for instance, leads to a a blogpost about the 2003 documentary film, directed by Andrew Jarecki, Capturing the Friedmans (which, by coincidence, I did see in a theatre when it was first released -- though I don't think I've ever written about it).

The second hit brings you to an incomprehensible alphabetical list of names.

The third hit goes to a page entitled "Walt Disney is EVIL!" (Need I say more?)

The fourth Google hit leads to my blog posts for the month of October 2006. To parse the mysterious search string, I find a reference to "nathan" in the context of Nathan Lane. The word "hankins" appears in a post about the Adrenaline Film Project at the 2006 Virginia Film Festival. "Sex" shows up in this headline: "New Jersey Court Rejects Same-Sex Marriage Rights" and in several other posts on a similar topic, the then-proposed (and since passed) Virginia Marriage Amendment (also known as the Marshall-Newman Amendment). "Pervert" appears only in a post about "the fallout from the Mark Foley scandal" and how people use the Internet to talk about sex. The word "sheriff" does not appear anywhere at all in that month's postings, which makes this whole situation even more confusing.

A Google search for the name "Nathan Hankins" (in quotation marks) turns up two Facebook profiles and an IMDB listing for someone with that name who has worked on the sound department of several films and TV shows. There are no hits for "Sheriff Nathan Hankins" (in quotation marks).

The mystery remains: Who is Nathan Hankins? Is he a sheriff or a sex pervert, neither or both? And what is his connection to Google or my blog?

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