Dear Readers:
Well, here we are again, it’s October 3, two days late this time, that last series of posts turned out to be a bear.
First some organizational notes. Sales Director Willy Loman submitted his resignation and went home to spend more time with his family: Linda, Biff and Harpo. His family are appalled, but have no choice in the matter, it’s their job to coddle Dear Old Dad.
Meet + Greet new employee!
Willy is replaced by Queequeq the Cannibal from “Moby Dick”. Company policy forbidding tatoos had to be relaxed for this new hire. His harpooning skills were simply too good to pass up!
Disclaimer: No whales or other sea mammals have been harmed on this blog. Land mammals, on the other hand… well that’s another story.
But running late as we are, let’s just get to the numbers, here are my closing-month metrics: Page Views went down – from 5,962 in August to 5,750 in September. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Number of Distinct visitors, the metric I care about more, went up, from 2,586 to 2,708. I think that’s the largest number of distinct people who ever visited my blog in a month. And it’s weird, I am getting all kinds of pingbacks from posts I wrote several months back and barely even remember. Just this morning there was a pingback from some Chinese blog, where somebody had read my movie review of “Hidden Figures”. Not reading Chinese, I have no idea what this person thought about my review, but I appreciate that they read it!
Next: Blanche Dubois just hopped off her streetcar to deliver my standard disclaimer:
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.
Next: Before posting my usual “Parade of Nations”, this here is my nostalgic trip down memory lane. In which I narcissistically “look-back” through my own posts of the last month, self-assess them, and highlight a few which I think are particularly good, I call this feature:
Highlights of the Month
So, here we go, in chronological order, and since there were so many long (multi-part) pieces, there are not really that many total posts, realistically:
- We started the month of September with this historical 5-parter on the Latvian Riflemen.
- Next, my plea to free Nelly Shtepa, followed a few days later, by an update on Nelly’s status.
- This 5-parter, another long Krutikov-inspired piece which (I believe) provides some valuable updates on the Syria War.
- This piece, being the “fair and balanced” and “other side of the story” type of thing, in regard to the Ukrainian “Rabbit”, Mr. Yatsenyuk.
- And last but not least, the piece I just finished yesterday, which turned out to be more of a marathon (and even emotional burden) than I thought. The theme being Russian income inequality and how it came to be. The theme also being The Great Calamity, aka “How Russia astounded the world.” A theme that is quite painful to most Russians and pro-Russians, evoking the types of emotions that Carthaginians no doubt experience, every time they notice Mighty Caesar and his elephants marching by. And to those who feel particularly pained by this theme, I have just a couple of thoughts: (1) One needs to start planning a better future for humanity — swallowing the red pill to escape the Matrix is a good start but it’s not enough — one needs to start thinking about building a better political movement; and (2) “Stalin will return from the dead and restore order” is not a realistic political platform in this regard.
That being said, it is now time for that Pomp and Circumstance that everybody has been waiting for: Time to march on with the
Parade Of Nations
My 2,708 September visitors hail 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 | 3022 |
| Canada | 505 |
| New Zealand | 328 |
| United Kingdom | 268 |
| Russia | 255 |
| Australia | 216 |
| Mexico | 95 |
| France | 90 |
| Hungary | 86 |
| Finland | 79 |
| Germany | 54 |
| India | 44 |
| Italy | 44 |
| Netherlands | 32 |
| Switzerland | 32 |
| Romania | 31 |
| Poland | 28 |
| Ireland | 26 |
| Norway | 24 |
| Sweden | 22 |
| Latvia | 20 |
| United Arab Emirates | 19 |
| Ukraine | 19 |
| Spain | 18 |
| Singapore | 17 |
| Croatia | 17 |
| Taiwan | 16 |
| Indonesia | 15 |
| Belgium | 15 |
| Austria | 14 |
| Brazil | 14 |
| Philippines | 13 |
| Serbia | 13 |
| South Africa | 12 |
| Czech Republic | 12 |
| Argentina | 12 |
| Turkey | 12 |
| European Union | 10 |
| Malaysia | 10 |
| Estonia | 9 |
| Ghana | 9 |
| Lithuania | 9 |
| Denmark | 9 |
| Vietnam | 8 |
| Oman | 8 |
| Israel | 7 |
| Thailand | 7 |
| South Korea | 7 |
| Greece | 6 |
| Azerbaijan | 5 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 5 |
| Pakistan | 5 |
| Lebanon | 4 |
| Slovenia | 4 |
| Slovakia | 4 |
| Japan | 4 |
| Portugal | 3 |
| Sri Lanka | 3 |
| Nigeria | 3 |
| Bulgaria | 3 |
| Moldova | 3 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| Guernsey | 2 |
| Egypt | 2 |
| Georgia | 2 |
| Kenya | 2 |
| Cyprus | 2 |
| Chile | 2 |
| Fiji | 2 |
| Colombia | 2 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Madagascar | 2 |
| Niger | 2 |
| Tanzania | 2 |
| Libya | 2 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| St. Lucia | 1 |
| Costa Rica | 1 |
| Malta | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Benin | 1 |
| Iceland | 1 |
| Algeria | 1 |
| Armenia | 1 |
| Nepal | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Botswana | 1 |
| Malawi | 1 |
| Albania | 1 |
| Montenegro | 1 |
| Uzbekistan | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 |
| Peru | 1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Guyana | 1 |
| Belarus | 1 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 1 |
| Morocco | 1 |
| Uruguay | 1 |
| Qatar | 1 |
Thanks y’all for visiting my blog!
Sincerely yours,
yalensis
Awful Avalanche 