How they get here

People usually arrive at a blog via Google. They pump in their search terms, cross their fingers and hope.

Blogger stats tell me the top three search terms that landed people here this week were:

1. Why are religious people so mean?
2. Is religion a scheme?
3. He who shall so shall he who

I love the first two. The third is a Jerry Lewis quote, of all things. Well, however readers get here, I hope they stick around.

The time has come

The world has gotten so stupid that I can't blog about it anymore. For me, this means I have to toss the real world and dive into writing the next great American novel.

Don't worry. I'll still blog now and then. It's just that I no longer promise to be here every day. I know this will make you cry, but it's the way it has to be.

In the meantime, go read the last great American novel that I wrote. Yes, it's a horror/sci-fi novel. But it's also an uplifting, anti-god primer that points the way to a possible fantastic future for the human race. Be forewarned: I plan to quiz you on the finer points of the plot when I get back. If you've had fun visiting this blog, give the book a shot. It's only $2.99 (because I want everyone to be able to afford it). I promise you it will be the most fun you ever had while reading a book.

Be well and try not to be mean to anyone while I'm gone. Okay?

PS: Feel free to use this post as an open thread. Tell me things. In fact, feel free to reveal your darkest secrets in the comments. All the people who visit this blog are fine, upstanding, decent human beings. They'd never repeat what you say here. Never. This is a completely safe space. So go for it!

If I should die

There will be no need for this post until the year 2052. Yes, it's all settled -- I will live to the age of 103. (I thought about living till 104, but something tells me that will be a very bad year for me. So 103 it is.) Obviously, there's no need to read this right now. I just want it to be posted so my biographers and the media can look it up when the time comes.

There's one thing that you know and I don't: the method of my death. Was it a missile from North Korea? I knew it! Well, it was quick (I assume). The luck of the half-Irish.

I want everyone to know that I had a great life. Sure, it sucked. But it was great, too! The big problem was drugs and alcohol. Hoo boy. Really did me in. And before they invented SSRI's, I was a disaster. But here's the thing. They did invent SSRI's and I finally stopped getting high. That this happened at all is very, very cool.

After those magical events occurred, I had a terrific life. I helped raise two boys, wrote books, blogged and enjoyed my days thoroughly. As far as I'm concerned, a good ending obliterates the pain of a tattered beginning. I won! That's the deal: I won!

As for this idea of an afterlife, there'll be none of that for me (or you). I'm fine without it. Dying seems an appropriate ending for a life. We see creatures die all the time. Humans, animals, fish, insects and every other creature -- they all die. I think that's okay and I truly don't mind the fact that I'm dead and gone forever. I'm just happy to have been here.

I mean, think about the odds. If a different spermatazoa reached your mother's egg, you wouldn't be you. Another person would have lived in "your" place. Really, it's a miracle that you're here at all, which means you're very lucky. You are the latest in a line of successful creatures that reaches all the way back to unicellular life. You come from an unbroken line of winners. The luck involved in all this should amaze you -- and it certainly amazes me. To have been a part of creation -- that's the ultimate prize. And every one of us snagged a place in creation. We were very, very lucky.

And if you can write a book or two, to boot, you won. And I did. Thanks for reading my stuff, guys. You made it all so much better.

Going, going, gone.

Why can't blogs disappear for SOPA?

Blackout.

There will be no Wikipedia on the internet tomorrow. It's going to be blacked out to protest S.O.P.A., the Stop Online Piracy Act, which will ruin the internet if it is passed by congress. I think this is a great protest message.

So why isn't Blogger offering a way to block out our blogs tomorrow? Wouldn't it be a powerful message if all your (and my) favorite blogs disappeared for a day? I can't believe they missed the boat with this one. It would have been so simple: create a way for our blogs to disappear for one day, and let us put up a SOPA protest message in their place.

Sadly, this blog will still be here tomorrow. Boo, Blogger!

Which posts get hits?

Blogger tracks how many hits each post gets, and it's weird to see which ones win the competition. Some people would phrase this as "which ones are the most popular." But of course, hits are just a reflection of the tags at the end of the post. Did people search for those words or not? That's what makes a "hit". Popularity has nothing to do with it.

Looking at the results, it's easy to see that when I write about popular or newsworthy things, I get hits. Just see # 1 below. In any case, here are my top ten posts, judged by # of hits (they're linked so you can click on them to read the posts):

1. So many people died in yesterday's tornadoes
2. Don't forget: the world ends today
3. Old Italian women in black veils
4. Confirmed: Giants' Brian Wilson is straight
5. Sundance documentary: Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare
6. What's with the baseball umpires?
7. A little help from some fab guys
8. Truly scary movies
9. Michio Kaku on Fukushima
10. NOVA Japan earthquake show

# 7 is just a video of the Beatles singing "Help". And it's no surprise that # 4 (Brian Wilson's sexuality) got a lot of hits. People wanna know. # 3 surprises me. You wouldn't think it would generate hits. I'm glad to see #8 up there because I liked that post. At least someone, somewhere read it. And hey, someone read a baseball post (#6)!

On the other hand, I got a zillion hits and no comments except for Annie's? What's wrong with this picture? C'mon, folks: comment! Tell me what you think. All sane bloggers welcome this. And as for your end of the deal, commenting is half the fun of visiting blogs -- and it's not scary, really.

One caveat regarding the lack of comments: the Brian Wilson post did generate comments. Not a lot, but comments. One was snarky but hey, that's fine. Express your opinions, people. It's what blogs are all about. Otherwise, we'd just write our posts on a typewriter and then drop the pages on the floor. Live a little -- comment.

Blogger's been buggy

Blogger just came back online for us, you know, bloggers. We couldn't post for over a day. Not only that, but Blogger lost some posts, notably my last post on word and phrase origins. And I'm not typing it up again. I don't even have the source material. Grrrrr. So if you missed your weekly word post, I'm afraid you'll have to wait for a new one next Thursday. Grrrrrrr again. Bad Blogger!

Blogger's transliteration tool

I was musing about this a moment ago, and a funny idea occurred to me. In case you're not on Blogger, this refers to the ability to have your blog translated into all sorts of languages. You just enable transliteration, click on a language and your blog becomes available in that language (or something; I'm not clear on this).

In any case, what I thought about was this: wouldn't it be fun if you could click on "British" and your blog would be "translated" into British? All your colors would be coloured, your defenses defenced. But what if it went beyond spelling and literally translated our American ways of saying things into common British usage?

Wouldn't that be wonderful? To read your own blog and see your folksy Americana translated into British slang? Surely someone will come up with the software to do this. I wish it existed now. I'd fetch a cup of tea and I expect I'd have a lovely sit-down with my new, posh blog. Oh, sod! The light's gone dark. Now, where'd I put that torch? I hope the charwomen didn't hoover it up. It's one of those teensy ones.

PS: If that got you in the mood, Wikipedia has a fun list of British words not used in America. I enjoyed the heck out of reading it.

Blogger quirks that drive me nuts

Overall, blogger (or blogspot) seems to be a nice place to set up digs. But it does have its irritating quirks. If you blog, do these things drive you crazy too?

Magic paragraph spacing
Extra spaces appear randomly between paragraphs. Sometimes there's a huge space between each of them. At other times, only between some. You try to axe the spaces but they just migrate. When you go back to look at your post, there's a space in another place. This can go on for some time and it drives me crazy. 

Only being able to upload photos now and then
This isn't the worst thing ever since you can always upload photos by mailing them to your blog. Still, why is a simple task like uploading a sometime thing at Blogger? 

Ever-changing Stats
I like the idea of statistics for the blog. But they don't really tell you anything you can trust. Stats might say you had 35 visitors today, but when you look the next day, it says only one person visited the day before. And they change throughout the day. I find that late in the day, you get meager stats. But early on, you think your blog is a happening thing. Why can't they be accurate? 

The skewing of audience stats because of Next Blog
I mentioned the other day here about the "Next Blog" button up on top of the page. People apparently click it. Why, I've even done it a few times. This brings random visitors -- and a skewing of the statistics. I've already written about my bitter sorrow upon finding out I'm not a hit in Somalia, after all. Kill the Next Blog button. Random people don't want to visit your blog, so why invite them in? Every blog is a special interest blog and you only want folks from within that group -- be it parents, sane people, religious nutjobs, atheists, liberal folks or nuns -- to visit your blog.

Does anything else drive you nuts here? Mind you, as I said at the outset, I'm also happy to be here. These may drive me a bit nuts at times, but they're really minor irritations in the long run.  We get a blog out of it, and that makes it worth the aggravation.

Next blog

At the top of this page, you see the "Next Blog" link. It's tempting and I think lots of us click it just to see where it leads.

It's very strange how Blogger organizes this. One day you'll click Next Blog and encounter eight insane religious blogs before you run from the computer in shock and horror. Another day you'll encounter ten Chinese blogs that use an alphabet you don't understand. (I did see some cool Shanghai blogs that day, in English, no less.) The next day the link brought me to a bunch of family blogs. They come in themes, it seems. (I wonder if they ever schedule "Atheist Blog Day". Something tells me they don't.)

After grokking this, I finally came to understand the mystery of the "Stats" page for users on Blogger. Before then, I had been looking at my "Audience" stats, thinking "Gee, lots of people in Singapore like me. And in Malaysia too." But it was just that folks in those countries mindlessly clicked "Next Blog" and it happened to be Northeast US Blogs Day. That's all. Sob. I'm not popular in Slovenia, after all!

Ah well, it was a fun fantasy for a while.