Instant junk mail

Every so often I receive a letter with no return address but lots of attack printing on the front and back.  I thought that these letters were in response to my “Party of One” columns in the Reader Weekly, but I stopped writing for the Reader over a year ago when I had been bumped one too many times.

But they keep coming every few weeks and every few weeks I put them unopened into the recycle box.  I guess this mysterious writer also reads this blog.  Thank goodness I don’t allow comments on it.

My advice to this writer is start your own blog.  It’s free and you might even earn a bit of ad revenue.

Thanks to my Reader Weekly readers

Every so often I get either a question or an observation:

Are you still writing for the Reader?

I haven’t seen you in the Reader for some time.

To the first I get rather snide: Are you still not reading the Reader?

To the second I thank for noticing I have not written for the Reader for some time.

I wish I could get either of them to regularly visit this blog.  I certainly had more readers in the Reader than I have for this little obscure blog.

As to why I stopped writing for the Reader Weekly, I was bumped one too many times.  Why should I write 800-1200 words each week, submit them before the deadline, and then open the next edition without seeing what I wrote.

I could say more, but I don’t want to mention names.

So, although I get far fewer readers for this blog, I get to write as little as much as I want.  I don’t have to wait until Thursday to see my latest tirade about Donald Trump:)

Thanks, Dave, for asking.  And thanks for your own letter writing to the Duluth News Tribune.  I just read your “Local View” from over a year ago.

Oh, and thanks to those readers of this blog that pass the link on to others.

More on Russian skullduggery on the internet

Views from Russia of this blog swamp views from all other countries combined.  I’ve known that reverse spammers visit low volume blogs, hoping the hapless blogger will click on the source URL to get who knows what result.  Takeover of my computer as a ‘bot for their nefarious activities?

Well, I got a peek at one URL from yandex.ru!.  After a redirect command it has a long string of characters that get truncated on my screen.  Since I never learned more than a rudimentary java script, I haven’t the foggiest idea what it all means.  And I won’t copy it here so that one of my loyal readers doesn’t fall into this nefarious trap.

See also http://magree.blogspot.com/2016/12/to-my-russian-visitors.html.

To my Russian “visitors”

I don’t know what you see in my little blog that you have more visits than all the visits from all other countries combined.  Your probably automatic visits just skew my statistics.

Please go away unless you are actually reading my posts.

Спасибо!

Awful Motors has introduced “new, improved” wheel design

Awful Motors has introduced square wheels, a cool new feature on all of its models.  Awful Motors stated in its introduction that round wheels were boring, they just went around and around.

This just in, after thousands of complaints of Awful Motors’ square wheels, the company has announced that by popular demand it will replace the square wheels with octagonal wheels, providing a significantly smoother ride.

Far-fetched?  This is not far from the abrupt changes that so many software designers put into their products.  A feature was working fine for millions of users, and then some designer has a “better idea”.

Some bothersome changes I’ve found recently are Yahoo! Finance’ rework of its pages and the Star Tribune’s changing relatively simple software to move between the print edition and an expanded article to cluttered software that never seems to work as one would wish.  I have no idea how other readers perceive the changes to the Star Tribune, but Yahoo had a page for comments.  These comments were almost all negative.

Google once had a simple way of moving from blog authoring to statistics without signing in again.  Now one has to log in over and over again and there are several clutter pages between authoring, feed analysis, and income review.

Apple, once the computer for the rest of us, has morphed into guess how this cool new feature works.  In the first few years of the Macintosh I was eager for a new version when real advances were made - hard drives, color, drag and drop, and on and on.  Now, I update to a major new release only when I buy a new device.

Often I think these changes are not for the benefit of the uses but the employment prospects of the designers.

My great influence as a writer

Every so often, somebody tells me they enjoy my columns in the Reader Weekly of Duluth but few write a letter to the editor about my columns.

I have people all over the word read my blog entries, but I suspect many of them are only occasional readers or even reverse spammers.

Well, I just had the wet pail of reality dumped on my head.

Only three people have read “Be Counted!  We the People Are Counting on You”.  Even posting a link to it in a comment to a turnout article in the New York Times didn’t help.  In fact, only one person recommended my comment.

On the other hand, seven people have read “Consideration for Garlic Lovers”.

Oh, well!  I guess three readers is better than the none I would have had if I had left the ideas in my head.

Ten years of posting

Yesterday I got a “gold star” from Google AdSense for having a web site for ten years.  I have been posting to this blog for eight years.  I haven’t got rich from either and I don’t have a large or medium following.  I can’t even get my family to visit my blog regularly:(  But it has been fun posting my thoughts and observations; and once in a while somebody tells me they liked a posting.

For various reasons, I am winding down my website, http://www.cpinternet.com/~mdmagree.  My goodness!  It has been over five years since I updated the home page.  One reason is that I am limited to 200 pages; another is that the tools for posting on Google Blogger are a lot simpler to use.

For the Irregular Blog, you might find some of the statistics interesting:

Total posts - 2158 with this post

Top ten posts by pageviews

235  2012-04-17 Добро пожаловать в мой русский посетителей
197  2012-12-20 Mike Peters' "Twelve Days of Christmas" puns for 2...
90    2012-08-28 Can't corporations live within their means?
84    2012-04-19 The kleptocracy of corporate boards
76    2011-12-22 For word nerds only
73    2013-01-17 A clever but off-the-mark sign
70    2012-05-24 Why facebook's stock price went down after the IPO...
60    2012-11-25 Free market and the Internet
56    2012-02-10 Extremism continues on the Unfair campaign
53    2013-04-10 Why snail research is important

What does the most viewed post mean and how come it is the most viewed?  It is Russian for “Welcome to my Russian visitors” and it because I have a suspiciously large number of page views from Russia.  I suspect that these are reverse spammers who hope that I will track them down and make a click on their sites.  They are wasting their time and mine.

Page views since beginning

34260 Russia
32684 United States
2196   Germany
1752   France
1194   Ukraine
1072   United Kingdom
1013   China
674     Netherlands
417     Latvia
350     Turkey

and many other countries large and small.

Search keywords

125 magree.blogspot.com
69   first minority president
56   mother goose and grimm 12 days of Christmas
55   hyperbolic humor
15   facebog
14   bluestone commons duluth mn
12   corporate entitlements
12   glen post net worth
12   unfair campaign
9     bluestone commons duluth

If you got to the end of this post, thank you!  If you like what you read on this blog, please tell your friends.  Otherwise, thanks for visiting.

The Russians are back!

Me and my fat fingers!  I posted an entry on how the page views of this blog from Russia had gone to zero.  Now the Russians are back and the U.S. page views are down and far less than the Russian views.

I just can't believe that there are more Russians who are truly interested in what I post than Americans.

If you reside in the U.S. and like this blog, please tell your friends.  If you reside outside the U.S. and actually read this blog, I thank you for your interest and I hope I can keep your interest.  Maybe if the ranking of this blog goes up enough, the reverse spam will go down.

Paper covers net, a readership comparison

Many of my acquaintances in Duluth ask me if I still write for the Reader Weekly.  Other than an occasional letter to editor, I haven't written any column since 2008.

After an article about some of the proposed mining in the region and the promises of no damage to the environment, I submitted my blog entry "The Invisible Adam Smith".  After all, the Reader often reprints material from the Christian Science Monitor and from Jim Hightower's web site.

With my using a wrong email address and the delay of having an open spot, the Reader Weekly published "The Invisible Adam Smith" in the 2013-04-25 issue.

Considering that hundreds of people in the region read most articles in the Reader Weekly, I assume more people have read my article in the Reader than have read my article on the web.  The latter count is 57!!  Since October when I posted it!

So, if you're an obscure blogger like me, you might have more readers if you write for some local print media than if you write a regular blog entry.  That is, paper can still be a more powerful medium than the internet.

Notoriety not good for memory

It's a bit embarrassing when people say "Hi, Mel!" and I can't respond with their names.  I know I have memory lapses, and sometimes I should have known a greeter's name.  But with a little bit of hubris, I like to think that others have more reason to remember my name than I have to remember theirs.  My name is in print more often.

That doesn't mean that everybody in Duluth knows who I am.  I do know a couple of movers and shakers and they know my name, but there are probably many more movers and shakers who have no idea who I am.

I did write a column for the Reader Weekly, a regional freebie, for a few years, and once in a while I submit a letter or an opinion piece to the Duluth News Tribune.  I've led a few classes for University for Seniors.  And I do speak up in class a lot.  I think this combination makes it easier for others to remember my name than for me to remember theirs.

When people ask if I'm still writing, I hand them my card with the URL of this blog.  I think I've handed out far more cards than there are readers of this blog.  I guess most people find it easier to read the newspaper than to type a URL in their browser.

Books, advertising, and independent vs. large corporation

My books-to-read list keeps getting longer and longer, possibly because I wander the internet so much and find interesting titles.  My next problem is that when I choose a book to read, how shall I obtain it?  As a hard copy from a library, an independent bookstore, or a large corporation like Amazon?  Or shall I get an eBook from another large corporation, Apple?

Getting a book from a library is free and my borrowing a book helps it stay in circulation for others to read.  Getting my own hard copy is either calling ahead to an independent bookseller or ordering it online.  Getting it from a local bookseller helps the local economy.  Ordering it online may get the copy to me faster.  Most would opt for Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  I opt for ABE Books which is a consortium of independent booksellers.  An advantage to ABE Books is that I can find foreign titles and maybe even have them shipped free.

But then I already own so many books, where can I put new books without throwing out older ones.  And which ones?

If I get an eBook, I can have a bigger choice of reading when I'm away, I can easily add comments, and I can easily copy excerpts for a blog entry.

Life is so full of choices!

So, what does all this have to do with advertising?  I've noticed that many sites that mention a book have links to that book at Amazon.  From reading about Maria Popova's "Brain Pickings" and seeing some of her links, I know that web authors can get a small fee if readers click on the book reference, probably only if someone buys the book.

Now I always like to earn a few bucks more if I can, but do I want to earn those bucks by supporting a large corporation?  If I go that route, I'll probably have to drop the Google Ads, which aren't providing many bucks anyway.  The easiest thing is for me to do nothing; given the underwhelming readership of this blog, the revenue from either source would be about the same, not much.  Maybe I should make this blog a "cleaner" reading experience by having no ads at all.

So, dear reader, if you see me around, please let me know what you think.  I think I have five or six regular readers in Duluth.

Thanks for reading

I would like to thank all who have been reading this blog, whether long-time readers or recent visitors.  The number of page views per day has gone way up for the couple of dozen per day.  I don't kid myself that I'm writing better.  It's mostly the same old stuff.

I think there are two factors, one mine and the other the times.

I've been writing more entries per day.  Probably because of the other factor.  It is election time in the United States, and so all the political junkies are looking for as many opinions and I like to peck out my opinions

I thank you for your visit to the "Irregular Blog", and I hope you will come back often.  And if you like what you read, please tell your family and friends.

Muslims do speak out

Many have complained that Muslims aren't speaking out about violence perpetrated by some Muslims.  Do all whites speak out against violence against blacks?  Do all blacks speak out against blacks who commit violence?  Do all... speak out against violence or hate spread by people like themselves.  No, most of us try to quietly go about our business, partly not wanting to be involved with hate, partly fearing the haters, partly feeling we don't have the right words, and partly believing we won't be heard.

Here's how two Muslims have spoken out.

"An unlikely fact-checker, an 11-year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, stood up and defended her right to an education, exposing Taliban’s biggest whopper. In an online blog for BBC, she wrote, 'I will show them the Quran, what Quran says. Quran didn’t say that girls are not allowed to go to school.' Malala also remembered Prophet Muhammad’s advice that, 'Seeking knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim man and Muslim woman.' Using her knowledge and unparalleled courage, Malala repeatedly pleaded with the world to help her people get rid of ignorant and barbaric occupiers." - M. Imran Hayee

Malala Yousafzai, now 14, was shot by Taliban extremists who felt threatened by a girl who threatened their skewed view of their religion and of the world.  How many brave children must be wounded or die before all perpetrators of violence, state actors or not, will see that "Peace is the way."

For more of how important education is where there are few fact checkers who can counter lies, see

"Spreading education in Pakistan harms Taliban", M. Imran Hayee, Duluth News Tribune, 2012-11-06.

If you want more "speaking out", read Dawn of Pakistan, Al-Jazeera, and The Daily Star of Lebanon, all in English.

Thanks for reading, please tell others

The daily page views of this blog have gone way up from the usual 20 or so, discounting the Russian reverse-spammers, to nearly 100.  I doubt that it is that I'm writing more interesting articles.  I think it is that much of what I write is of interest in the election season.  In fact, U.S. page views are now about the same as Russian page views.

Whatever your reason for visiting here, regular reader, finder via Google, or link from another site, I thank you for visiting.  If you like what you see, please tell others or put links in your own site.

In turn, I'll do my best to post some interesting thoughts more regularly.

Thanks!

To my one faithful reader and others

Within an hour of posting a new blog entry, it seems within an hour, at least one person has read that entry.  Whoever you are, thank you!

Unfortunately, I haven't given you or others much to read lately.  That's because I've made my to-do list a bit longer and blogging has taken a back seat.  I originally called this blog "Irregular Blog" because I didn't know how often I would post something.  I guess the name still means something.

One, the fall quarter for University for Seniors has started at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.  I signed up for five classes, but fortunately I was wait-listed for two.  Otherwise, I would have been really full up.

Two, I bought some new toys - an iPhone and an iPod.  From the simple Apple Macintosh "For the rest of us" we have seen the boxes get smaller and the capabilities grow almost exponentially.  It is no longer a simple matter of pulling the computer out of the box, plugging it in, and starting work.  There are settings galore, dozens of features to explore, and a whole lot more to do all you want to do.

Three, I finally found a round tuit to reinsulate the floor of our cabin.  That is a blog entry in itself.  Oh, yes, I don't do much blogging at our cabin because the connection is so darn slow.

There is a bit more on the new toys, but I must go finish installing Skype on the iPad so my wife can use it when she visits our daughter and they can talk to our son in Japan.

So, please keep checking.  You never know when I might post three entries in a day.

Thanks for your readership.

To beat somebody with a stick, recite to them a limerick

My wife and I were talking after dinner about the connection between how much I write and how much I read.  I said that I don't read so much as that I write a lot about what I do read.  She replied that I do read a lot compared to many other people.

She then asked about how to get out of the Limerick group on Facebook that a relative put us into to.  I said that I had already dropped out, but she hadn't figured out how to yet.

Of course, those who know me well know that this will create all kinds of associations in my head, both clever and silly.  With about four or five iterations I came up with the following:

There was a lady from Limerick
Who had a very poor memorick.
She wore lots of bows
To get lots of beaus.
She got one, but was it Tom or Rick?

Before the above result, I had the last line as:

She got a laddie and lost him quick.

I didn't think that was a good parallel to the second line.

On my first try I had a different ending, but …

One better ranking of this blog

This morning when I was looking at the statistics for this blog, I was intrigued by the access through the search term "how to argue with a tea partier". I did a google search and my blog entry came up number 12 of about 6.78 million!! The entry is "You can't argue with Tea Party supporters" and is about an off-the-wall, missed the point response to my Local View about the Tea Party in the Duluth News Tribune last June.

Why do I write?

A friend asked me this the other day.

I have a lots of reasons to write: I read a lot; I respond to what I read; I'm a performer; I like to share what I think.

I know I'm not the world's greatest writer.  I can tell because this blog has not gone viral; on a good day a couple dozen people check my "headlines" via a feed.  But I do know that my writings resonate with those who have "open" minds; that is, minds not locked into a certain world view.

Yesterday I thought of another reason - to protect freedom.  Nope, I'm not on the battlements fighting against an invading army.  But I am expressing my thoughts in a way that I hope gets people to think beyond a certain limited view.  When we have a limited view, we think our way is the only right way, and when we do so, we keep making the same mistakes over and over.  That deprives us of the freedom to "think anew."

Here we are at Irregular Blog entry 1000

This is the 1000th blog entry I've posted in the "Irregular Blog".  It's been nearly four-and-a-half years since I posted the first entry at http://magree.blogspot.com. 

It hasn't been the most popular blog around; it took a long time to even get to over 20 subscribers per day and to get two followers.

I suppose it doesn't matter in the bigger scheme.  I've gotten some ideas out of my head.  Some of you, if you didn't get new ideas in your head, you might have gotten a little different view of some ideas.  I do hope that long-time readers, if any, have had a few "Ah, hah" moments and a few chuckles.

Almost twelve years ago, newly arrived in Duluth and walking around, I was struck with the urge to write more than letters to the editor.  I told myself, if you want to write, you have to write.

I did join the Lake Superior Writers Group and wrote a few essays.  One was a collection of bear stories, but only Kyle Eller, editor-to-be of the Duluth Budgeteer, was the only one to show up that evening.

I started picking up the Northland Reader, which had ads for writers.  I called Richard Thomas, the editor, and he said I should send something in.  I sent in "Bear Stories".  Lucky me, he published it in the 1999-09-30 issue.

Every few issues, I would send something more and he generally would publish it.  Then I started submitting something for every bi-weekly issue.  Then the Northland Reader became the Reader Weekly, and I started writing weekly.  Then I was bumped down to bi-weekly.  My guess is that I had about 160 fans; that is, something like that many people told me they enjoyed the columns.

I think I wrote over 200 articles until I was bumped one too many times.

I posted many of these at my website, http://www.cpinternet.com/~mdmagree and still have a few buried on my hard drive.  I also started writing a blog at the same site.  Then I discovered Blogger and started writing entries for it.

People often asked me what I wrote about.  I replied, "What I damn well please."

I have continued that attitude with this blog.  But now I don't have to meet a deadline.  Of course, I like to post something everyday, but if I don't, I don't.  However, if I want to write two or three entries, I can.  I have no space limitation except my readers' attention span.

If you like what I write, please tell your friends.

Here's to the next 1,000 blog entries.  No, let's be ambitious, here's to the next 10,000 entries.

The Velcro controversy - equal opportunity satire

Jim Heffernan is at his best when he satirizes public figures (or himself or other journalists).  He really takes on many politicians of different persuasions in "Disaster feared as worldwide Velcro failure spreads".

Be sure to read Jim's latest blog entry sitting down in a chair with arms.  Neither Jim nor I can take responsibility for anyone falling out of his or her chair laughing.