How’m I Doin’, Hey, Hey – June Edition

 

Hello everybody, this is Bartleby the Scrivener speaking.

After the issues we had closing the books last month, and what with our company metrics taking a downturn, my master asked me to pitch in and help more.  I enthusiastically jumped into the project and put in a lot of overtime.  See, I just came back from “Motivation Training” and then next week I am attending a course on “How To Present Yourself In a Professional Manner” to your customer base.

Abraham arguing with the angels: “Nu, what if it was just 10 good guys?”

Anyhow, for June there is good news and bad news.  First the bad:  For Metric #1, i.e., the page views, compared to May, the number went down from 3,036 to 2,935.  However, for Metric #2, which is the one we care about more, i.e., number of distinct visitors, the number went up, from 1,165 to 1,188.  Okay, by a squeaker, but still!  And my master would be perfectly happy, and would continue doing this project, even for 100 readers, let alone over a thousand!  It’s like that story in the Bible where Abraham bargains with the three angels and gets them to keep lowering the bar on how many good guys can be in a town before these commandos wipe it off the face of the Earth with extreme prejudice.

Before proceeding, the master requests that I add the usual yalensis disclaimer, even though I would prefer not to:

Your Privacy is Important to Me: WordPress calculates who is a distinct person by their I.P. address. It also uses the I.P. address to deduce which country you live in. I myself can’t see I.P. addresses unless you leave a comment. In which case I can see your email address; and from that I COULD look up your I.P. if I were curious, which I am not.

This is yalensis speaking now. Thank you once again for posting the ledger book, Bartleby.   I like your new positive attitude, and I plan to give you a raise and a big promotion.  Some day.

Before posting my usual “Parade of Nations”, this here is my nostalgic and subjective “look-back” to the past month. Looking through my own posts, I want to highlight a few which I think are particularly good, I call this feature

Highlights of the Month

So, here we go, in chronological order:

• June was distinguished by the fact that I did several multi-parters, starting with the first one, the EnergoAtom story, which I did in four parts.  This is an interesting story, albeit depressing, because it continues the chronicle of the egregious pilfering of an entire nation, aka The Ukraine.  This is an object lesson in what happens when rapacious oligarchs control the government directly and use their positions to loot every form of public property which has any value.  I continue to hammer on this theme of rapacious “privatization”.  Why?  Because I am a hopeless Cassandra.
• My next story was also a 4-parter, starting here, about Alexander Pushkin’s daughter Tasha,   This one was a change of pace from the horrors of contemporary Ukraine, a story of interest to literature majors and also people interested in this fascinating era of Russian history.
• Next, my story on the shortage of mesaton, an anesthetic drug, in Russian hospitals.  This one also had a Ukrainian angle, but included some interesting tidbits about the Russian medical system.  I always like to add some additional value to each story that I do, whether it’s a map, some geographical facts, some background information, that’s what distinguishes an essay from just raw translation.
• Next, my Operation Y story, a two-parter, starting here.  I liked this story, because it motivated me to watch several of the old “Shurik” movies, which I had never seen before.  Those movies are actually really funny, especially if you like slapstick humor.  And nobody can hold a candle to the classic Soviet actors and clowns — those guys were really good at what they did.
• And then, of course, the series I just finished, the Nikita Belykh series, starting here.  I won’t claim that this is my best Navalny series.  That honor would have to go to my Navalny/Chaika series, from way back in January.  And frankly, Navalny is just not as fascinating as he used to be.  However, I think my Nikita series was good, and I may be the only Anglophone source for Nikita’s Latvian connection, because I didn’t see that bit out there on the Anglophone web, although the rest of the story was covered adequately in Anglophone media.

Be that as it may, it is now time to march on with the

Parade Of Nations

My 1,188 June visitors cranked up their Ham radios and and called in from the following countries, in order of most to least page views. WordPress allows me to save these stats as a CSV file, from which I copy-pasted onto here.

United States	781
United Kingdom	331
Russia	248
Canada	215
New Zealand	202
Australia	177
Germany	163
Romania	87
Mexico	60
France	58
Brazil	48
Czech Republic	42
Netherlands	37
Sweden	35
Finland	31
Vietnam	28
South Korea	22
Taiwan	21
Spain	19
Serbia	19
Ukraine	19
Italy	18
Norway	17
Denmark	14
South Africa	14
Belgium	13
India	12
Poland	12
Ireland	11
Lithuania	11
Estonia	11
Turkey	11
Switzerland	11
Hungary	8
Bosnia & Herzegovina	8
Bulgaria	7
Japan	6
Slovenia	6
Singapore	6
Argentina	6
Philippines	6
Malaysia	6
Egypt	5
Slovakia	5
Latvia	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Kenya	4
Georgia	4
Austria	4
Greece	3
Macedonia	3
Thailand	3
Indonesia	3
Israel	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Luxembourg	2
Pakistan	2
Zimbabwe	2
Chile	2
Albania	1
Haiti	1
Bangladesh	1
Colombia	1
Nepal	1
Tunisia	1
Jersey	1
Oman	1
Portugal	1
Moldova	1
Croatia	1
Barbados	1
Libya	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Venezuela	1
Seychelles	1
Algeria	1

People: Thank you for visiting my blog, and please come back, y’all! (Everybody except you, Olex, and you know who you are!)

Sincerely yours,

yalensis