What happens when you search for “Gowanus” and “baseball”? You find the Gowanus Rotisserie Baseball Gazette (who knew?) and a logo for something called the “Gowanus Aura” whose logo is on Webshots and which we reproduce here to the right. Now, avoiding the temptation to go on at length about a “Gowanus Aura,” we’ll say that we stumbled into this when we happened upon the Rotisserie Baseball blog and an entry it has about a bizarre but really cute designer dog called a Torky and its comment that it ranks at the top of the Google search results. We are not making this up.

Torkies? Gowanus Auras? Gowanus Baseball?

Okay, the Gowanus baseball thing isn’t that off-base, given that a location on Third Avenue near Third Street is said to have been the site of Washington Park, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played from 1898-1912 and that a wall along Third Avenue is actually a remnant of some part of the park. The Times ran a story on the park back in February.

Just for the record, when you Google search “Gowanus” and “stink,” which we just did on a whim as we were writing this, the No. 1 return is Gowanus Lounge and specifically a recent item on the Roebling Oil Field in Williamsburg. We only place third for “Gowanus” and “stench” but also come up No. 1 for “Gowanus” and “slime.” We have achieved this status without the help of search engine placement consultants.

We are honored and humbled.