The past couple months had unusual things bring readers here. People looking for that post about which color tablet makes which Easter egg color, for example. Easter isn’t all that unusual, but most months it doesn’t happen. Or people on Reddit linking to one of my pictures to explain Mark Trail drama. As best I can tell, in May, none of that happened. There were just people coming around for their usual reasons. These reasons are plot recaps of story strips, this one S J Perelman essay, and bots trying to place generic comments on every web site they can reach. And what does this imply for my readership totals?
They went incredibly average. May 2021 looks to be the average-est month I’ve ever had. WordPress says there were 4,910 page views in May 2021. That’s below the twelve-month running mean, leading up to May, of 5,478.7 views per month. But it’s almost dead on the twelve-month median, which was 4,930 page views. There were 2,979 unique visitors as WordPress counts these things. That’s again below the mean of 3,317.5. But it’s still quite close to the twelve-month running median of 2,979. There were 38 comments in May. In the twelve months leading up to May there were a mean of 41.3 comments per month, and a median of 39.5 comments per month.
It’s in likability that May stands out. There were 199 things liked in May. The mean is 114.2 per month, and the median 120.5. I think people love me mentioning forgotten sitcom Alice.
The most popular things from May this past month were mostly comic strip news, as usual:
- Retail now available wholesale
- Episodes of _Alice_ I still remember for some reason
- What’s Going On In Mark Trail? What makes crickets “land shrimp”? January – May 2021
- Buckles up again
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Who’s this Ghost Phantom haunting the Phantom? February – May 2021
I’m glad other people are as baffled by remembering anything about Alice as I am. The most popular of the MiSTings was Dreams of a Lost Past/Loss, Part 2 of 4 and I don’t know why that should be the best-liked slice of that.
Not one of my most popular pieces, somehow, but deserving of attention? Here’s how to get rid of WordPress’s Block Editor and get the good editor back. You’re welcome, everybody who hates WordPress’s Block Editor, which is to say, everyone who uses WordPress’s Block Editor. This would include the people who programmed the Block Editor, except we know they do not use the Block Editor. If they used the Block Editor they would have either fixed any of its limitless problems, or resigned rather than continue to endorse that fiasco.
My plan for story comic recaps for the coming month is to do these:
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (8th of June)
- The penultimate recap of Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (15th of June)
- Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (22nd of June)
- Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (29th of June)
- Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (6th of July)
As ever, that’s subject to rejiggering if events warrant. When Rocket Raccoon gets done insulting The Amazing Spider-Man, I figure to drop that strip. The comic will have cycled back into strips I’ve already recapped. While I could do a better job recapping them now, do I need to do that work?
I’m open to thoughts about how to replace Spider-Man. Might do one of the not-newspaper-syndicated story comics like Rip Haywire. Or the humor story strip Safe Havens. But since I’ve missed its big multi-year Mars Mission storyline that’s probably anticlimax. I will not be reporting on what’s going on in Endtown because by the time any Endtown story is a month old I have no idea what’s going on in it. But, if someone has a good idea, please share.
In May, some 85 countries sent me any readers at all. 18 of them were a single reader each. Here’s the roster:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 3,416 |
| India | 226 |
| United Kingdom | 164 |
| Canada | 161 |
| Germany | 117 |
| Brazil | 91 |
| Philippines | 83 |
| Australia | 81 |
| Italy | 36 |
| Spain | 30 |
| Sweden | 29 |
| France | 28 |
| Norway | 26 |
| Austria | 22 |
| Finland | 22 |
| Romania | 21 |
| Netherlands | 18 |
| Ecuador | 17 |
| South Africa | 17 |
| Denmark | 16 |
| Indonesia | 16 |
| European Union | 14 |
| Ireland | 14 |
| Mexico | 14 |
| Japan | 12 |
| Poland | 12 |
| Argentina | 10 |
| Jamaica | 10 |
| New Zealand | 10 |
| Czech Republic | 9 |
| Egypt | 8 |
| Greece | 8 |
| Albania | 7 |
| Malaysia | 7 |
| Turkey | 7 |
| Chile | 6 |
| French Guiana | 6 |
| Georgia | 6 |
| Israel | 5 |
| Nigeria | 5 |
| Portugal | 5 |
| South Korea | 5 |
| Thailand | 5 |
| Ukraine | 5 |
| Belgium | 4 |
| Cape Verde | 4 |
| Cayman Islands | 4 |
| Singapore | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| Bahamas | 3 |
| Colombia | 3 |
| Croatia | 3 |
| Hungary | 3 |
| Kuwait | 3 |
| Peru | 3 |
| Russia | 3 |
| St. Lucia | 3 |
| Taiwan | 3 |
| Bangladesh | 2 |
| Burundi | 2 |
| Costa Rica | 2 |
| Guernsey | 2 |
| Honduras | 2 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 2 |
| Paraguay | 2 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Algeria | 1 (*) |
| Brunei | 1 |
| Bulgaria | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Dominican Republic | 1 (*) |
| Guatemala | 1 |
| Iceland | 1 |
| Latvia | 1 (*) |
| Lebanon | 1 |
| Libya | 1 |
| Lithuania | 1 |
| Macau SAR China | 1 |
| Maldives | 1 |
| Morocco | 1 |
| Oman | 1 |
| Qatar | 1 (*) |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 |
| Serbia | 1 |
Algeria, Dominican Republic, Latvia, and Qatar were single-view countries in April also. There’s no countries that have gone three months in a row with one view each.
WordPress says I posted 26,084 words in May, bringing my year’s total up to 101,995. I’ll accept that, even though it means my average post was a hefty 841.4 words. I think the MiSTings are ratcheting my averages up. It does bring my average post for the year up to 676 words. That’s the highest that figure’s been this year.
In the time between US President Dwight Eisenhower’s first meeting with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1956) and the start of June, I have posted 3,042 pieces here. They were viewed a total 237,789 times by 136,548 unique visitors.
If you’d like to be a regular reader, great! Keep doing the thing you’re doing right now. That would be easier if you have an RSS reader. You won’t show up in my statistics, unless you comment, but you can read the articles from my RSS feed. If you don’t have an RSS reader you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn lets you add any RSS feed to your friends page. More blogs than you imagine have RSS feeds. Give it a try.
And if you have a WordPress account, you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add this page to your Reader page. You can also sign up for e-mail delivery of posts as they happen. That will give you posts with all the typos that I fix in the quarter-hour after a post publishes, so, be warned.
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
My favorite fictional Nebushumor essays
WHY ARE THERE NEW BACKGROUNDS ON “Graffitti”? IS “Graffiti” STILL A THING?
CALCULATING THE NUMBER BLEEM (BY SPECIAL REQUEST FROM THE ESTATE OF GEORGE CARLIN)
60’S POPEYE: “JEEP TRICK” – EUGENE GETS YET ANOTHER ORIGIN STORY, THIS ONE INVOLVING THE EVIL MAGICIAN FROM THE RB “FROSTY” SPECIAL
MISTED: “POPEYE MEETS THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER,BUT LOVED CAT DANCING AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB”
EPISODES OF “THE TONY RANDAL SHOW” THAT I REMEMBER FOR SOME REASON.
IF MAJOR HOOPLE EVER MET JUDGE PUFFLE WOULD THE WORLD EXPLODE IN ON ITSELF?
DO MALE KANGAROOS HAVE POUCH ENVY?
IN WHICH I’M INFORMED I INSULTED PAUL McCARTNEY LAST THURSDAY.
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Ah, some of these end up being extremely fictional; I can’t remember a thing about The Tony Randall Show, even though it seems like the sort of thing I’d have paid attention to at the time. Also a mysterious complete gap in my mind: The New Odd Couple (1982), which tried to … wait.
Wait.
Sorry, I just learned DePatie-Freleng Studios did a Saturday Morning cartoon version called The Oddball Couple. Playing the Felix role was …
No, I have to stop and verify that this entire thing isn’t a prank I snuck into Wikipedia somehow.
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Yep,they made “The Oddball Couple” around the time they made “The Barkleys”,the cartoon version of “All In the Family” that wasn’t “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home”
The “Tony Randall Show” was a pretty good MTM work and family comedy with Tony playing a Phillidelphia judge with the actor who would go on to play Jerry Seinfeld’s dad as his court clerk,and a sassy English maid at home with his two kids (he was a widower I think).
For what it’s worth I came thisclose to using EPISODES OF “C.P.O. SHARKEY ” I REMEMBER FOR SOME REASON but then figured no-one was watching NBC when it was on,not even fictionally. You have to have some element of believability to a post like this.
To finish your above thought– … playing the Felix role was a Cat Named Spiffy. Also,Fleabag,the Oscar character had a secretary named Goldie Hound which as far as I know is the closest we came to an animated version of “LaughIn” unless you count “Baggy Pants and the Nitwits”.
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I appreciate all this insight into a bunch of shows I do not remember at all! And I’m amazed more and more by The Oddball Couple.
Now, the weird obscurities that I remember bits of for absolutely no good reason include Mama Malone, because the gimmick that it was also a show being done from inside the apartment and they were kind of trying to give cooking recipes caught my imagination; also It’s Your Move, because the chessboard-themed opening credits worked for me for some reason; and then Lottery!, for that episode where the lottery-winner doesn’t believe the lottery was legitimate and tears up the check and throws away the $5,000 advance, and while they’re ultimately convinced the thing is legit and can get a new check, the five thousand dollars is lost forever … only in the last scene you see a guy at the garbage dump see five one-thousand-dollar-bills flutter out, and he grabs them, and starts doing this happy little dance.
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