Ramblin' with Roger Turns Two

Happy blogiversary to me! Two years since I first put keyboard to pixel, or whatever happens here, and started whatever this thing is.

One of the really useful things I've learned is that people find out about when you write about them. Case in point, the Royal Guardsmen, whose Snoopy vs. Osama single I had dissed, without hearing it, though I had read the lyrics. Or when I noted the obsessive JEOPARDY! fans who have been archiving shows, including the two I appeared on.

I'm fascinated by how people come here. If I were REALLY curious, I'd buy the Sitemeter Gold software, but since I'm only mildly curious, I have to rely occasional scans of the last 100 people to the site at any given time. Not entirely scientific, since I don't do it regularly, but still I've noticed what seemed to draw people to the blog:
Bianca de la Garza - the former Channel 10 TV anchor who interviewed me for JEOPARDY! whose now a "hot babe" on FOX 25 in Boston
Non-urban initiative - my chastisement of this urban myth
JEOPARDY! probably enhanced by the Archive

There are also links of other bloggers that have brought people here. Not surprisingly, Fred Hembeck's probably #1, but it appears Scott from Scooter Chronicles is #2, Jaquandor from Byzantium Shores is #3 and the inestimable Chris 'Lefty' Brown is #4. Again, not scientific, but based on random observations.

My favorite posts have been the back-and-forth I had with Mr. Hembeck. I write about Tom Clay. HE writes about Tom Clay and other things, which leads me to write about the Royal Guardsmen.

If I were to have guessed, I would have thought I had posted once a day, except once extra for Lesley Ann Warren's 60th birthday, and three extra times for Oscar-worthy films of the '20 and '30s. This is what the numbers tell me:

Once a day, every month, except for 1 extra time in August, September and December 2006 and April 2007, 3 extra times in March 2007.

I'm averaging about 105 visits per day this year, though there's been a recent uptick. I should probably add a fraction for that day and a half in the winter when I switched from Old Blogger to New Blogger and I didn't notice that I had no working counter. Don't recall my lowest count, around 50, but my highest count was on April Fools Day, when, inexplicably, I cracked 300. In fact, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to these things.

(Picture of the month taken 1:25 pm, April 29, 2007; the picture up top, from April 2006 to April 2007, about 5 minutes earlier.)

It seems that about 65% of my visitors are from the United States. I always have a goodly number from Canada and especially Great Britain, but I also seem to get hits from lots of countries all over the word. Also, increasing, Unknown Country. That doesn't mean I don't know the country; this means Sitemeter does not know the country via the numeric equivalent of the URL.

So what do I want to do in the coming year? More or less the same. But there is one thing I've decided: no more nasty things about unelected arbiters of taste. This list includes Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, Nancy Grace, people like that. (So, not to bother with Rush Limbaugh's Barack, the Magic Negro video.) This isn't an attempt to be "nice"; this is an acknowledgement that these people so often irritate me that I'm probably incapable of thinking of some fresh way to express my displeasure. This doesn't mean I won't on occasion find a link that well represents my position about them, but I won't bother using my own brain cells to bother venting at them. I'm inspired by this line: "These are minor, but important changes...Never get angry at the stupid people" (Piano Song by Erasure).

Now, elected or appointed figures are fair game. This means Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney are fair game. Yet, I won't spend a lot of time on them either, but only because life's too short, and I generally have better things to talk about.

Ultimately, the blog may be about something Anna Quinlen wrote about the heroine of the movie Freedom Writers (Newsweek, 1/22/07): "Ms. G....embraced a concept that has been lost in modern life: writing can make the pain tolerable, confusion clearer and the self stronger."