The following arrived in my inbox this morning from WordPress, with an option to post the report to the blog. My comments are inline in italics 🙂

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!. [thank god!]

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,800 times in 2010. That’s about 9 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 27 new posts [I think that must include some archive stuff?], growing the total archive of this blog to 202 posts. There were 18 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 28th with 42 views [bigtime, boys, bigtime!]. The most popular post that day was Riddley Walker DVDs are no moar!. [was that really 2010? seems so long ago…]

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were thoughtcat.com, twitter.com, facebook.com, googleads.g.doubleclick.net, and thoughtcat.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for pluto, evil cat, riddley walker, evil cats, and coffee jokes. [lol!]

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Riddley Walker DVDs are no moar! May 2009

Links June 2009

No wonder my son is confused about Pluto April 2010
3 comments

Cats in the news April 2006

Spreading the word of Russell Hoban again on 4th February January 2010

[Interesting that the numbering style didn’t make the transition very well, but I was impressed by the email and the fact that the email text addressed me as “you” whereas the blog post is in the third person – nicely thought-out by WordPress I think.]

As a moderator of the The Kraken, the original fan forum for brilliant author Russell Hoban, and the webmaster for the SA4QE Hoban fan event site, I get quite a lot of alerts to mentions of Hoban and his works on the web. The latest looked promising – an article mentioning one of my own favourite quotes: “After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I went on to read the article and found it’s on the website for Ohioans for Concealed Carry, a pro-gun pressure group (“We are about freedom. We are an advocate for all firearms related rights”). The context for the Hoban quote is as follows:

“…Without even realizing it, you’re probably using terms that actually help the people who want to disarm you,” says Alan Korwin, author of Gun Laws of America. He has written a brilliant article on the vocabulary of gun conversations, which includes some tactical advice. For example, Korwin suggests replacing the conversational phrases on the left with those on the right:

pro-gun —–> pro-rights
anti-gun —–> anti-self-defense
Second Amendment —–> Bill of Rights
concealed carry —–> discreet carry
gun lobby —–> civil rights organizations
gun rights —–> civil rights, human rights
handgun —–> sidearm
gun-control laws —–> illegal infringements
anti-gun —–> anti-rights, anti-gun bigotry

… and so it goes on. I get the feeling Orwell is turning in his grave.

Current mood: depressed

Thank you to everyone who came to my kitchen concert a couple of weekends back. It turned out to be a lot more of a challenge than I’d anticipated, but was great fun.

It was actually part social media experiment: I put out notices on Facebook, Twitter and the blog that I was going to do this “concert”, in which I would improvise guitar solos to songs nominated by anyone who was interested, uploading them to YouTube throughout the evening. I got a fantastic response from my friends on Facebook, who requested songs by Lady Gaga, Patrick Wolf and Duran Duran among others – although no response from anywhere else. (I suppose Facebook is what you might call the definition of a captive audience, more so than Twitter, probably, while the blog is not something that really gets followed in the same way, so I was neither surprised nor particularly bothered by this.)

I listened to each of the songs at least once before recording myself playing along, to get the key right and get a feel for the song, but apart from that wasn’t familiar with any of the songs, with only one exception (For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her, by Simon & Garfunkel). The process was: practice a bit offline; record a clip of myself playing along and play it back to check the volume levels; record the actual solo; listen to the whole thing to make sure it wasn’t awful; upload to YouTube; post to Facebook and Twitter. Then do it again with another song until I’d done as many as I could from those requested. I think I only re-recorded one or two solos; everything else was the first and only take, which is not showing off, just trying to be true to the idea of improvisation.

What I didn’t bank on, because I am stupid, was how long it would all take. As explained in my earlier post I recorded each performance on my iPhone, and as quick as that had seemed a few weeks back when I wasn’t doing a “live concert”, for my loyal friends on Facebook sitting there waiting for the next number it was probably like attending one of those dodgy early Dylan gigs where he’d spend 20 minutes just tuning up. The whole evening went on a lot later than I’d planned and by the last couple of songs at getting on for midnight I was really flagging. The energy levels weren’t helped by the fact that I’d done a full day’s housework before the gig in anticipation of the return the next day of my wife and kids, who had gone off on holiday in July. (I only mention this because I quite like the idea of having performed a whole evening’s music after doing somewhat more household chores that day than the average rock star.)

The biggest pleasure apart from getting so many requests in the first place was seeing that friends from all around the world were indeed “tuning in” and listening to what I was doing. I had first alerted my Facebook friends with a simple status update, and only the day before set the gig up as an event on Facebook and invited people because I wasn’t confident anyone would “come” (I usually find invitations to events on Facebook quite irritating), but in the end was delighted that over a dozen people sat through at least part of it. From my own (musical) perspective it was an extremely interesting exercise because it pushed me – the range of requests was very varied (I had made it clear that no style or genre was off-limits), and there were songs requested that normally I would barely have considered listening to, let alone play along to. All I can say is I am now much humbled by, and have much greater respect for, Beyonce and Lady Gaga.

All the videos from my kitchen gig can be found on my YouTube channel

From around 5pm UK time tomorrow, I’ll be in my kitchen playing guitar solos along to a range of songs and tunes selected by YOU. Request a track using the comment form below (preferably include a link to a good version on YouTube) and I’ll play along to it and post a video of the resulting mash-up. ANY song, ANY tune, ANY genre. I can’t promise I’ll do all requests but I’ll do as many as I can.

This is an “as live”, virtual event – the performances won’t be streamed live but will be recorded and then posted up on the web right afterward, so you can “attend” without actually going anywhere and if you can’t make it tomorrow evening you can watch the videos afterward.

For a reminder of my first “bachelor kitchen guitar improvisations” from a few weeks back go to the blog home page and scroll down to the videos, or go to my YouTube channel and browse there.

Thoughtcat.com is moving to a new hosting this weekend, which may result in some content being unavailable temporarily. Stay tuned!

She was only doing what she thought was right, according to this receptacle in a Warwickshire branch of Sainsbury’s.

The Labour Party faced “complete moral bankruptcy” for much of its term in government, former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott did not say yesterday.

“The invasion of Iraq in 2003 began our steep descent into utter moral bankruptcy,” Prescott didn’t say during his address to the Scottish Parliament’s annual Festival of Politics.

“Despite millions protesting against the war, we went ahead and did it. It was a tragedy that should never have happened,” Prescott continued not to say.

“When we were first re-elected back in 1997 we held the moral high ground – I mean, we could hardly avoid it, following as we were 18 years of complete and total Tory moral bankruptcy.

“Unfortunately the feeling that we would bring the qualities of morality and fairness back to Britain was quickly squandered by Tony Blair’s shameless devotion to George W. Bush’s sickening foreign policy,” Prescott failed to add.

Prescott, who is not campaigning for the post of the Labour Party’s Official Moral Compass, because such a post does not exist, went on not to say: “I and many others in the party were extremely moral, and disgusted by what was going on in our name, but somehow we just took our eye off the ball. And hey presto, bankruptcy ensued.”

Other topics Prescott did not refer to included Blair’s “morality-free attachment to Rupert Murdoch and other icons of big business”, his “morally questionable lack of proper banking regulation” and “downright shaggingly dubious failure to stop the expenses scandal before it rocked Westminster”.

“I mean, there are so many things that morally bankrupted us that I can’t even begin not to mention Peter Mandelson,” Prescott was not reported to have said.

Mr Prescott ended his speech by not warning that the party could not continue to conduct itself as it had in the past.

“You can go on if you like and just have somebody doing what’s always been the way, but we cannot continue to run a political party in such a manner,” he was heard not to say.

This story was a submission to Newsarse but it was a bit late. That’s my excuse anyway 🙂