This is a bit of a twisty tale, but bear with me, because it involves hubcaps, a prostitute, sno-cones and craigslist.

In the works is this Edge of Town blog, which will offer vignettes, pieces of conversations, funny signs seen around town -- much of it contributed, hopefully, by readers (e-mail me!).

I go looking for something to write about for said blog. I was not dressed as a street-walker, unless frumpy cargo skirts are the new daisy dukes.

On Belmont Avenue, I find a man outside of a shop with a door covered in hubcaps and about 80,000 hubcaps in back. Walt -- "Mr. Hubcap" -- seems to have a story.

But the conversation pauses when a self-proclaimed prostitute, carrying a black umbrella and Pilates book, comes up and bumps me.

"Are you working?" she hisses.

"I am working as a journalist," I say.

"Then you shouldn't be wearing high heels, they scream prostitute," she says. (My shoes were about one-inch wedges, therefore having neither height nor heels).

"Uh, OK, thanks for the fashion tip," I tell somebody who is wearing blue jean cut-offs and turquoise sparkles around her eyes.

"I'm a prostitute!" she says. "This is my block. Why aren't you wearing flats?"

"If you're a prostitute, why are you wearing flip-flops?" I ask. "And why are you carrying a book on Pilates?"

These apparently are fighting words. To avoid a melee with a possible Pilates practitioner, I flee. I will visit Mr. Hubcap on another day -- and wear sneakers.

This left only one item on the blog, an almost two-week-old entry: "City Turns Up Heat on Shaved Ice Machine."

But on Monday that blog item gets 10 times more online hits than the actual article it accompanied, a piece on West African drumming in the Sierra.

"What's going on?" I ask the online editor.

"Local news at its finest," she says. "People are mad and want to protest." Also someone had linked it to craigslist.

But if there were really thousands of people reading craigslist every hour, then my friend should have been able to sell her really cool iron headboard for more than $100 when she moved.

HMac of Fresno Beehive fame solves the mystery for me.

"Dude," she says (despite being an English major and stickler for all other forms of word-correctness, HMac liberally applies the term "dude" to both sexes). "It's the word shaved. It's 40 million pervs searching shaved and some of them are ending up with shaved ice."