Another Warning From The Dream World

I know it’s an inexpensive way to get to Anchorage, Alaska, but do not take the free cable car service running from Seattle to the city — or to any of the hanging, amusement-park style cable-car destination spots on the Alaskan Peninsula or any of the Aleutian Islands. Yes, it’s even free if you want to go to Attu, and you get plenty of fresh air through the open top of the car, but they’re not heated, and you’re carried alarmingly high over the ocean surface, particularly if you need to use the bathroom, which is done by unlatching the door and crouching a little while holding on very tight. Add to that the travel time and it’s really worth the money to take a car, boat, or plane.

Missing International Rabbit Day

“I imagine you’re wondering why I’m not talking to you,” said our pet rabbit. This was the first I’d heard he wasn’t talking to me, but I’m like that. I looked thoughtful, or confused, which is about right for me any time. “You know Saturday was International Rabbit Day?”

“I do. And did.”

“And you’ve noticed that I’m a rabbit, right?”

I allowed that I had.

“And we didn’t do anything international!”

“I … talked about you online. I’m pretty sure someone from Canada heard about you.”

“And I’ve never even been to Canada! How international a rabbit can I be when I haven’t even been there?”

“You haven’t even been to Ohio, either — ”

“I’ve missed Canada and Ohio! I’ll never be a world traveller at this rate!”

“You hate travel. You spent two days sulking when we put you upstairs in the air conditioned room this summer.”

“You can’t go to other countries if you won’t even stand going upstairs.”

“You could bring other countries in here. It’s the least you could do for International Rabbit Day.”

I considered telling him he was a Flemish giant, so was already kind of International by not being in … and then I realized I couldn’t explain where the Flemish were from without getting in more trouble. So I promised to do something about it next year.

Reused Thoughts

They delivered a new recycling bin. It’s a monstrously huge bin, large enough to dispose of a compact car. It looms above the garage and the first floor of the house, and I can’t swear that it isn’t the source of these deep, menacing chuckles I’ve been hearing at night.

But this does mean we have to get rid of our old recycling bins. They’re supposed to be put in the new recycling bin, the one bigger than my elementary school. That doesn’t bother me, but, when the time comes to throw away the new recycling bin … I mean, its successor is going to have to be at least as large as the Farnum Senate Office Building, right? It just follows.

There where the lens is wide

So, to summarize, I’d like everyone to know that I do too know how to take a picture on a digital camera. I don’t want to brag, but I have noticed how every digital camera in the world has a little button on the top that you press to take the picture. I’d got this worked out pretty well sometime in like 1978 when I first heard of the idea of taking pictures with anything more advanced than taping the newspaper photograph up to the window so I could trace over it on some paper.

And yes there were too digital cameras back then, models with up to four pixels and the ability to differentiate between one shade of grey and another slightly identical shade of grey, producing photographs that could be shared on the primitive Internet just by running a simple UUencode filter on the file type, then copying it into your e-mail client, which was horrible, and then waiting twenty minutes to find out that your Internet connection died halfway through, and then running down the hall to the recipient and slapping him for wanting to see a picture of this. The point is, every digital camera in the world works by having a button on the top that you press.

Yeah I know cell phones don’t take pictures like that. And I know with iPads you take pictures by standing there holding the iPad up until everyone around you notices how awkward you look and feels bad that you have to do something so embarrassing, and that finally triggers the shame sensors that puts you out of your misery by taking the photo already. Those don’t count. I’m talking about cameras, the kind made of fresh-mined cameraonium ore, and with icons on the side showing that little lightning bolt and the flower representing the climax of Eadweard Muybridge’s vision of a day when the average person could have flowers electrocuted.

A Clarification of Intention

It’s not at all my intention to be up all night arguing on the Internet. I’m simply that I need to offer a useful corrective guide to people who haven’t got the faintest idea what they’re talking about, reading about, thinking about, and who are probably bad people anyway, and should go find a breakfast nook or something where they can stand, facing the little cubby-hole where a telephone was supposed to go back in the 1920s when people had these things and stop posting these silly things where people can see them. Thank you.

The Big Novelty Act

I ran across this bit in Anthony Slide’s The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville:

Of the genuine freak acts, one of the most revolting, but popular, was Willard, the Man Who Grows, billed as “the star attraction of the Wintergarten, Berlin”. Clarence E Willard was featured in vaudeville during 1913 and 1914, and could add 7 1/2 inches to his height of 5 feet, 9-3/4 inches. He could extend his arms to anywhere from 8 to 15 inches, and could make one leg 4 inches longer than the other. As “Wynn” noted in Variety (October 17, 1914), “Willard is one of that strange species of novelty that one must see to appreciate.”

I really kind of have to agree: I’m not entirely clear how “becoming seven and a half inches taller” could be an act, exactly, yet I’d be interested in seeing it, so apparently that is an act. And that fact means I can’t fairly make a joke about how, like, yeah, in 1913 the only other public entertainment options were watching baseball from before they bothered mowing the lawns inside the ballparks and catching the latest Balkan War. But I also don’t see what extending an arm eight to fifteen inches could do to be revolting. The best I can get is creepily unsettling. Maybe I’m not thinking about it hard enough.

First-Class Prize-Winning Thinking

The Post Office had a nice, big sign in the glass of the front door, which is useful as it keeps people from being scared by their views in or out of the front door through. The poster warns: “If it costs $250 to collect your prize it’s probably a scam.”

It’s the “probably” that gets me. Someone with the Post Office No Scam Bureau looked over the records and found, yeah, these first 88 money-for-prizes deals were frauds, but then here came two ones where they legitimately turned the prizes over, and the copy went from “it’s a scam” to “it’s probably a scam”.

Also, boy, you have to figure the guy running the cash-for-prizes scam who was charging just $247.85 was looking at those posters and thinking, “Whew! Under the wire! Nobody’s going to suspect me yet!”

Bookstore Numbers

14: the average number of minutes you have to hover around the History section of a bookstore before hearing some fully grown-up man explain in all sincerity to another fully grown-up woman that, actually, the United States was justified in getting involved in World War II. This is down one minute from the same statistic as measured last year.

Some Autocomplete Joys of Life

This is one of those wonderful little things that really exists and that I just ran across. If you go to Google and type “www” into the search bar, it comes up with auto-complete suggestions of http://www.google.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.yahoo.com, and http://www.youtube.com. At least it does for me. I can’t explain why but the Yahoo auto-completion particularly makes me giggle. Enjoy!

More Comics (still not all of them)

For the folks who liked my last head-sup over to the mathematics blog, because I talked about comic strips with mathematical themes, I have another roundup of some of the comic strips which, in the last ten days, also found reasons to try telling jokes about mathematics. It won’t be on the quiz, but this will be.

Misconstrued Poetry Restorations

The North American Council on Poetic Quality has issued the following guidelines of words that can no longer be used in consumer- or industrial-grade poetry. Exemptions will be applied for cause. The Council also reminds all that National Haiku Pedantry Month starts the first of November, so be ready to help them enforce the rules about cutting words and nature imagery by leaping up on desks and shaking golf clubs about while insisting it’s everyone else on the Internet that has the issue and they should go write limericks instead.

O: as a particulate extrapolation that fills in those little bits where it feels the sentence hasn’t quite got started yet, the word-letter “O” has suffered from extreme overuse and fatigue, bringing the population of the word-letters to the brink of extinction. Therefore the word-letter “E” is to take its place, as the stocks of this are much more robust and have a tendency to get into the garage if not thinned out some. Use with abandon, the long E only.

What It Means To Be A Math Major

Primarily, it means I just can not believe these people who go out memorizing the value of — the base of the natural logarithm — to only five places after the decimal point. I mean, come on, the second through fifth digits are repeated in the sixth through ninth positions! If you’ve bothered to memorize the first five digits past the decimal point then you’ve got the first nine down. Why deny yourself the free fruits of your mental labors? And don’t go telling me that it’s because you memorized it in base two or base sixteen or one of those silly other bases absolutely nobody needs. If we were talking about memorizing the value of in base twelve then we wouldn’t have talked about the decimal point, would we? We’d be talking about the radix point. Sheesh.

Secondarily, it means I believe in the existence of people who’ve memorized the value of to a mere five places past the decimal point.

Musical Confession (A Note)

After a conscience-wracked night I’ve decided to come clean. I told a joke about the deli guy whistling the opening of The Towering Inferno yesterday, and that’s not actually so. I disguised the name of the movie so as to protect his privacy, but now I think I was doing a disservice to the historical record, which hasn’t been released in MP3 form yet. It was actually the first fourteen notes to The Poseidon Adventure.

I am, of course, fibbing about this too.

Musical Breakthrough

Forensic musicians have announced a major breakthrough in trying to figure out what exactly the guy at the delicatessen has been singing all this time. Computer-aided analysis indicates he probably has been whistling what was originally the first twelve notes to the theme of The Towering Inferno, somehow. Also it turns out there was a theme to The Towering Inferno, which goes far towards explaining why it’s been so hard to figure out what it was. Further research into just why anyone would be whistling this tune must wait for a researcher brave enough to actually ask the guy, for crying out loud.

I Must Have Overheard This Wrong

“They also scroll, like proverbial butter”? I don’t offhand know any proverbs about butter scrolling. Granting that I did hear it wrong, though, what should I have heard instead? “They also roll, like proverbial butter”? That isn’t much of an improvement. “They also butter, like proverbial rolls”, now that parses, but the other way around is just absurd. Clearly I’ve just got to go back around and try this whole listening thing again, from the start.

Franklin P Adams: Poesy’s Guerdon

[ Please let me draw another bit of verse from Franklin P Adams and the Tobogganing on Parnassus collection. ]

( *   *   * I do not believe a single modern English
poet is living to-day on the current proceeds of his
verse. — From “Literary Taste and How to Form it,”
by Arnold Bennett.)

What time I pen the Mighty Line
Suffusëd with the spark divine
As who should say: “By George! That’s fine!”

Indignantly do I deny
The words of Arnold Bennett. Why,
Is this not English verse? say I.

And by the proceeds of that verse —
Such as, e.g., these little terc-
Ets — is not filled the family purse?

Do we not live on what I sell,
Sonnet, ballade, and villanelle?

     *   *   *
“We do,” She says, “and none too well.”

Getting To Yes

My dear spouse bought the new album by Steven’s Salute, and it was a bunch of downloads, because it was bought on the Internet. The only tangible goods ever bought on the Internet are Woot shirts, ammunition, and wooden carvings of chickens.

iTunes reported the album, particularly the second song, had a playing time of 372 hours (honest!). Possibly when Steven’s Salute was finishing their records they entered something in the info box and GarageBand wanted to double-check so it popped up a little box asking “Are You Sure? Yes/No” and since the instinctive response to an “Are You Sure?” dialogue box popping up is to hit “Yes” before it’s even read because they never actually stop you from doing something stupid, the software thought it was the prog-rock band and figured, yeah, fifteen and a half days isn’t that much longer than “The Gates of Delirium”, so it accepted everything.

It’s a pleasantly zippy 372 hours, for what it’s worth.

The Internet and Pumpernickel

You know how the Internet has changed things? Suppose that you like pumpernickel. In the pre-Internet days you’d probably just go along liking pumpernickel, eating it in appropriate amounts and wondering if you’re maybe the youngest English-speaking soul who still eats it on purpose. Certainly nobody you ever meet except your grandparents eats pumpernickel. This might be because you switched to a supermarket, away from the bakery that’s in the midst of downtown’s bustling Customers Pronking Into Traffic district because it closes fifteen minutes after you get out of work and there was that time you asked about what eight similar-looking loaves were and got into a painfully awkward conversation with them not understanding what it was you didn’t understand, and don’t ever have to talk with anyone to buy actual bread anymore.

Now and then something called pumpernickel turns up in the sandwiches Arby’s tucks into the weird subdivided parts of its menu board like they don’t want to have them but also can’t take them off without hurting somebody’s feelings. But mostly, you just like pumpernickel, the taste and the way saying “pumpernickel” over and over again makes you feel, and the store usually has sufficient pumpernickel for your immediate heavy-breaded needs, and the worst that ever happens is occasionally your brain is haunted by the idea that ABC’s classic “The Chomper” public service announcement supporting dental health might have shouted out to pumpernickel and carrot sticks as good things to eat, please hopefully not together. How pumpernickel can be all that good for teeth was still mysterious, what with it just being bread, but at least you could take in the message.

With the Internet, that’s changed. You can find all kinds of people who also like pumpernickel, which right away is a big change in your bread-based social interaction. Before any pumpernickel-based socialization you had was of a strictly practical kind: buying pumpernickel, eating pumpernickel, maybe answering the awe-struck questions of children who don’t understand why you’d go eating a kind of bread that’s the color and pattern of the decorative walkways in the garden paths in back of the boring restaurant their parents dragged them to once and swore never again.

Now there’s a theoretical aspect to the whole thing, having bread-themed social interactions in a setting that’s far removed from any actual bread, or possibly any other actual people. Certainly real people can’t be writing this much about pumpernickel, or as they spell it “pumpernickle” or worse, and why whatever it is you like about it is the wrong thing to like about it. Where would they find time to do the necessary things of daily life, like driving to the hardware store or being hissed at by squirrels?

And yet what they write is compelling, because it all leaves you miserable. You’ll learn, for instance, that your favorite brand of pumpernickel was created by a white supremacist, Euell M Pumpermeyer or whatever, who figured that by improving the yeast or rye or whatever used to make his bread products he’d be able to inspire wider eugenicist movements. He sold out decades ago to a big multinational conglomerate, and he’s been dead for literally a couple years now anyway, and at least he was an incompetent white supremacist who never noticed that yeast is just not among the top hundred things suppressing people. But still.

Worse, you’ll discover that the multinational conglomerate that makes that pumpernickel, only with not so much overt racism and more high-fructose corn syrup, is still a horrible, horrible company. Some in the pumpernickel forums try to argue about this, pointing out the company’s placement as one of the Top Ten Ethical Multinational Conglomerate Bread Manufacturers, but that mostly means they’re responsible for fewer than average maimings of low-level employees and there’s room to plausibly dispute their links to the Blood Caraway trade. And the supermarket isn’t any great shakes either because it’s sustained mostly by the profits derived from smacking cinder blocks with kittens. This earned the store a certificate for being in the top twenty percent of ethical supermarket chains before the ethics panel went into the shoe closet and started weeping and hasn’t stopped yet.

All these things were going on before, but you never had to know because you never learned anything about the pumpernickel trade beyond that you could buy and, if you chose, eat some. Now the Internet can reassure you that, yes, “The Chopper” does tell you pumpernickel is somehow important for your teeth.

The Competition

The Robert Benchley Society has put up its valid entries for the 2013 Humor Prize, on a web sit that safely anonymizes all the contributions. I know which is mine, I hope, though I reserve the right to change my claims about authorship if someone else’s gets through the preliminary judging. You’re free to find someone else’s better, but if you do please don’t tell me as I’m still recovering from that whole two- and three-star ratings issue.

The Comics (or some of them)

Over that way a bit on my mathematics blog I do a bit of talking about comic strips which mention mathematics or mathematical themes or that just catch my eye for whatever reason. So if you’re interested in comics and a particular theme I’d appreciate your poking over there and reading them. My commentary on them isn’t meant to be funny, but the strips are at least trying for that.

The Mystery Of My Power Cord

I found in the hotel room — this is true, by the way — that the rubber insulation of part of my laptop’s power cord had got torn up. I’m not sure how it happened. The cord was wrapped up, and inside a plastic bag, because I’ve liked putting power cords inside plastic bags ever since that airport security screener told me that was a smart thing to do. But when I pulled it out it looked like it had been chewed open by a tiny bear, or maybe that it had exploded as an even tinier hippogriff guppy hatched from within it. I know what you’re thinking and no, our pet rabbit has a solid alibi. So far it’s still giving power but I wonder how lon

My Dimmed Stars

So had you noticed there’s these star ratings you can give my entries, in a little box just beside the “Leave a Comment” link? No, I didn’t think so, because nobody notices them and nobody bothers with them. But my Dearly Beloved pointed out, someone has noticed and gone and given a bunch of articles two and three star ratings. This puts out a good question: who’s taking the time to seek out and disapprove of something they don’t have to bother with? Based on this M O, my suspects right now are everybody on the entire Internet, ever.

Forms of New Jersey Local Government (4)

The Quick-Jervis form of municipal government is designed specifically for townships in the Kittatinny mountain range of New Jersey, in the scary parts far in the northwest where the old New Jersey Bell phone books suggested they didn’t offer phone service and should maybe ask Pennsylvania for help. Under this scheme, designed for the ridges and valleys that are pretty steep by New Jersey standards, town council meetings are held in those buildings where on one side of the hallway it’s the third storey and on the other side it’s two storeys up to ground level. In accord with these needs, these municipalities will sneak over to Pennsylvania to steal cable TV and to taunt Pennsylvanians about their state liquor stores. As satellite TV is not mentioned, obviously, the measures are somewhat out of date, and Pennsylvanians don’t understand their state liquor stores anyway.

Singing the Praises of Pants

I admire the work that the mighty Land’s End Catalogue Company has put into finding ways to sell me pants. It’s been mostly sending me catalogues showing that there are pants, leaving it to me to conclude that I could if I so wished buy them, but I admit I don’t have many better ideas. If they tried, say, chasing me down and holding pants up to me so I could kind of see how they’d look on me if I were flat, that wouldn’t entice me to buy more. This is why I’m not an important pants marketer. I presume they want me to wear them, but they should know that once I’ve bought them, the pants are wholly my concern and it’s none of their affair what I do with them.

Pythagoras and the Golden Middle-Ish

Say what you like about Pythagoras of Samos, and you mostly can because nearly all his leading followers have gone and died from embarrassment over being asked to explain what precisely the thing with the beans is about, but here’s a bit of legend that really caught me. It’s from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which I never heard of either: “Pythagoras is said to have had a golden thigh, which he showed to Abaris, the Hyperborean priest, and exhibited in the Olympic games.”

Think of the stories that sentence implies. The obvious question is, was it the left or the right thigh? And was it the whole thigh or just one side? I’d think you’d want the gold to be the outer thigh, so as to make it easier to show off, but maybe Pythagoras didn’t get to pick. For that matter, why a golden thigh?

From the Local News: Pole Barn Controversy Resolved!

The local news at noon had some great news for the top story: the pole barn controversy was settled! The controversy was, this company built a new research building too near a neighborhood full of people who complain about these things. We’re not talking about a hideous building, the kind that parents warn children to avert their eyes from, that collects awards from embittered architectural societies seeking vengeance, and which naturally accrues collections of modern art. This is more … think of every light industrial building you’ve ever passed that was too boring to notice. Have that in mind? No, because it’s too boring a building for you to even imagine noticing it. Even now you’re forgetting how I described it. But that’s what the whole controversy was about.

I don’t argue this wasn’t right for the top story in the local news, because it’s obviously local news-worthy, unlikely to get on the national Sunday morning talk shows where elderly white men complain how nobody’s LISTENING to them enough. Plus, if it wasn’t pole barn controversies they’d have to fill the program with traffic accidents and student housing fires unexplained but possibly linked to the fireworks they might have been setting off, just wanted to get that idea of students and fireworks out there even if we aren’t sure there were fireworks, and calling the weather forecast all kinds of silly things besides “forecast”, like Precision FutureCast Doppler 8000 or some such rot.

What delights me is that the anchor went from announcing there’d been a settlement in the pole barn controversy to tossing it to the reporter in the field, who just had that there was a settlement in the pole barn controversy and hopefully there’d be more details later. Then everyone looked at the building and yawned and curled up for a nap.

Oh, yeah, the company that owns the building? They make particle accelerators. I would have thought that could have settled the argument sooner. “Stop complaining,” they could have said, “or you’ll see a bunch of kaons where you don’t expect them!” But no, they just fell back on ordinary settlement processes like painting and property tax abatement requests. Where’s the imaginative scope?

Franklin P Adams: To a Thesaurus

[ My first selection of poetry from Franklin P Adams seems to have been received well, so let me bring out another piece from Tobogganing on Parnassus. My eyebrow is raised — well, my raising-eyebrow eyebrow is raised — by the spelling of favour, and both “sustention” and “opitulation” are new ones on me, but “meseems”, I like on this first meeting. ]

O precious codex, volume, tome,
    Book, writing, compilation, work
Attend the while I pen a pome,
    A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

For I would pen, engross, indite,
    Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,
Record, submit —– yea, even write
    An ode, an elegy to bless —–

To bless, set store by, celebrate,
    Approve, esteem, endow with soul,
Commend, acclaim, appreciate,
    Immortalize, laud, praise, extol.

Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,
    Expedience, utility —–
O manna, honey, salt of earth,
    I sing, I chant, I worship thee!

How could I manage, live, exist,
    Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,
Be present in the flesh, subsist,
    Have place, become, breathe or inhale.

Without thy help, recruit, support,
    Opitulation, furtherance,
Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,
    Favour, sustention and advance?

Alas! Alack! and well-a-day!
    My case would then be dour and sad,
Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,
    Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.

Though I could keep this up all day,
    This lyric, elegiac, song,
Meseems hath come the time to say
    Farewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!

Our Rabbit Explains

“I like baby carrots,” said our pet rabbit.

“I know you like them, but why would someone send them?” We’re having enough trouble with mysterious deliveries.

“Because I like them,” he said again, obviously upset that I wasn’t getting this point. “I look like I’m big when I eat the tiny carrots!”

“You are big.” He’s a Flemish giant, which as a breed grows to Mark Trail-esque proportions. “You’re bigger than I was through third grade.”

He nodded, “And I didn’t even go to third grading! That’s how big I am!”

“Where did they come from, though?”

And our rabbit looked at me as if disappointed I was so dense. “They’re cut from full-size carrots to just look like baby carrots. Don’t you know how the world works?”

“Why would the world arrange somebody to send you baby carrots?”

“Obviously the world knows I like them!”

“But why?”

“Because it’s true! It couldn’t know that I don’t like baby carrots, because that isn’t true, and if you actually know something then it has to be a true thing or else you don’t actually know it.”

I like his reasoning, but I feel like there’s something missing.

To Buccaneer These Alumnae

I don’t really want to encourage this sort of thing but I ran across this in the spam filter and every block of five words in a row makes me smile, so I hope you enjoy it too.

Farewell… Hi, im from , Asia Continent. Thank for this message, it was satisfactory content and also utilise me few strain to buccaneer my alumna.

I do thank whatever search engine optimization scheme is behind this for their help in inspiring me to buccaneer my alumna too.

Numbers the August 2013 Way

I said last month I was going to carry on tracking numbers, even if some of them are kind of disappointments, such as the square root of five. The big number according to WordPress’s statistics counters. The number of views dropped from 375 in July to 349 in August, and I don’t have the excuse of a shorter month for that. The number of visitors also dropped from 178 to 141. But this does mean the number of pages per viewer has risen from 2.11 to 2.48, which is the highest on record. I may not be getting many readers in, but they’re reading more of me.

According to WordPress, the top articles of the past thirty days were:

1. You Can Send Me Any Obsoleted Bills For Responsible Care in which I do some thinking about how to arrange money;
2. What I Notice In Every Old Picture Of Me and what’s horribly wrong about all those pictures, based on the real actual me;
3. Community Calendar: Streetlight Counting Day for a little event;
4. Getting Started and my troubles with that;
5. In Which I See Through A Chipmunk and the odd story of the squirrels and their comedy club develops; and
6. Some Parts Of The Horse, a quick useful guide.

None of these was a top-five article last month (the last two were tied for most views). S J Perelman: Captain Future, Block That Kick! was tied for tenth place, so it’s staying popular. My top commenter is again Corvidae in the Fields, whom I thank for loyal readership, followed by Chiaroscuro, who just edges out Ervin Shlopnick, all friends loyal, true, and talkative.

I learned also how to find the most-commented-upon articles, which do include backlinks or trackbacks or whatever the heck they’re called. For this month the top five of those were:

1. In Which I See Through A Chipmunk (as above);
2. You Can Send Me Any Obsoleted Bills For Responsible Care (ibid);
3. Comic Strip Celebrities Named (one from late July that was liked);
4. Some Now-Forgotten HTML Tags (one of last month’s most popular bits);
5. Fly The Little Skies (a short bit from late May and about the tiny airport in Trenton, New Jersey).

Once again the countries sending me the most visitors were the United States (268), Canada (8), and the United Kingdom (7). Countries sending only one visitor include Singapore, Chile, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Albania, Portland, Mexico, and France, so while I may be losing popularity in Sweden, Poland is holding steady.

It does strike me that the shorts, usually one or two hundred word pieces, get a lot more views than the weekly essays that aim at seven hundred words. This may be telling me something important about how I write.