Statistics December: I Give In And See How People Like Being Mad At Funky Winkerbean

WordPress’s statistics page is still broken for Safari. But curiosity finally got the better of me and I used Firefox to look at what December’s, and for that matter 2022’s, statistics looked like. So let’s take a quick peek at that, shall we?

So what I saw in December was a suspiciously even 6,000 page views. That’s my third-highest total in the past twelve months, beating the running mean of 5,710.8 and running median of 5,395 views. These came from 2,957 unique visitors, below the running mean of 3,026.8 but above the median of 2,931. Altogether I got 142 comments which is down a little from the running mean of 151.3 and median of 148.5. And there were 89 comments, way above the running mean of 56.7 and median of 51.5.

You know, if a long-running comic strip could end every month it’d do wonders for my circulation, but it would also make me sadder. Maybe I should start giving updates on The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day.

Driving all this, of course, is that people are mad. And what are they mad at? Comic strips. And one comic strip more than any other. Here’s the roster of the five most popular things that I published in December:

• Why Is Everyone Mad at _Funky Winkerbean_?
• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 18, 2022)
• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 11, 2022)
• Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 25, 2022)
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Are there even stories anymore in Gil Thorp? September – December 2022

My most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was Statistics Saturday: Adaptations Of _A Christmas Carol_ Ranked and I’m glad that’s got some love. Some of these versions are quite good.

Talking about the comic strips is sure to stay my biggest feature. So here’s my plan for what story strips to discuss in the coming weeks. There’s no extra Popeye comics that I’m aware of, here.

• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (10 January)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (17 January)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (24 January)
• Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (31 January)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (38 January)

You may think this map is worse, since it squeezes the countries of the world into a smaller space while filling up with white space that conveys no information at all. So it is. But understand the trade-off: someone got paid to make this report worse.

There were 86 countries sending me any readers at all in December. Here they are:

Country	Readers
United States	4,391
Australia	247
Canada	185
India	133
United Kingdom	132
Italy	114
Brazil	86
Philippines	54
Peru	47
Spain	44
Germany	39
France	31
Finland	29
Sweden	27
South Africa	25
Japan	24
Norway	22
Ireland	19
European Union	18
Malaysia	18
Mexico	17
Switzerland	17
Romania	15
Pakistan	13
Sri Lanka	13
Austria	11
Denmark	11
Netherlands	11
Thailand	11
Turkey	11
Chile	10
United Arab Emirates	10
Taiwan	9
Czech Republic	8
Indonesia	8
South Korea	8
Croatia	7
Nigeria	7
New Zealand	6
Venezuela	6
Barbados	5
Dominican Republic	5
Hungary	5
Puerto Rico	5
Saudi Arabia	5
Singapore	5
Greece	4
Poland	4
Russia	4
Belgium	3
China	3
El Salvador	3
Estonia	3
Kuwait	3
Portugal	3
Slovenia	3
Argentina	2
Armenia	2
Bangladesh	2
Bolivia	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Bulgaria	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
Latvia	2
Lithuania	2
Malta	2
Serbia	2
Vietnam	2
Albania	1
Algeria	1
Cameroon	1
Colombia	1
Costa Rica	1
Ecuador	1
Fiji	1
Guatemala	1
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Isle of Man	1
Israel	1
Luxembourg	1
Macedonia	1
Maldives	1
Montenegro	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Ukraine	1

I don’t know who’s on a one-reader streak. Not worth digging out. Nice to see the Isle of Man make an appearance, though.

WordPrees tells me that as of the start of 2023, I’ve had 338,223 views from 190,278 unique visitors, made 3,621 posts, and gotten 5,633 comments altogether. And that in December I posted 19,010 words, one of my more verbose months in the year. Must be all that Grumpy Weasel talk. My words-per-post jumped up to 613.2 for the month, and for the year climbed to 575. We’ll just see whether I stay this talkative in the month to come.

Statistics August: People Want Me To Explain If The Phantom Is Dead Already

Once again, not to spoil things, but the man who cannot die. But people are very interested in the current, yearlong-and-still-going, story in which Mozz foresees and tries to prevent The Phantom’s death. And the wholesale destruction of his family’s heritage. Let me start off by sharing the five most popular things published in August, for the month of August:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did Captain Savarna have kids with The Phantom? May – July 2022
• Why I Am Angry at Funky Winkerbean, Yes, Again
• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why can’t Dick Tracy neutralize the Moon People’s superpowers? May – August 2022
• And Then I Noticed Something About Funky Winkerbean
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Where is King Arthur that Arn and Maeve are regents? May – August 2022

Also ranking high were earlier essays about what was going on in The Phantom. I trust that’s from old links or imperfect Google matches. I’m sure everyone found their way to something useful, sooner or later.

Comic strip recaps remain my most popular feature here, though. Let me share my plan for those comics for the next couple weeks. It’s to cover these, at these times:

• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (13 September)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (20 September)
• Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (27 September)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (34 September)

Only 1.94 views per visitor, so there’s no way to use this data to test Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism about fish and visitors smelling after three interactions with the main content repository server.

As for readership totals? Those were doing pretty well in August. All that Phantom trade, I’m sure. There were 6,375 page views here in August, well above the twelve-month running mean of 5,109.1 views per month. It’s even farther above the twelve-month running median of 4,702.5 views in a month.

There were more unique visitors too. 3,292 unique visitors stopped in over the course of August, which was a dogleg left under some lovely shade. The running median is 2,742.8 unique visitors, and the median 2,682.5. I was even better-liked: the number of likes given was 206, way above the mean of 148.7 and mean of 147. It was chatty on top of that, with 61 comments, compared to a mean of 46.8 and median of 47.

85 countries or their equivalents sent me any views at all in August, up from 81. 19 of them sent a single view, barely down from 20. Here’s the roster of all the origins of my viewers:

Country	Readers
United States	4,378
Australia	527
India	221
Canada	195
United Kingdom	157
Italy	104
Brazil	73
Germany	47
Nigeria	42
Bahrain	41
France	41
Sweden	40
Ireland	39
Spain	37
South Africa	33
Philippines	23
Romania	22
Malaysia	20
Finland	18
Mexico	17
Netherlands	15
New Zealand	15
El Salvador	14
Indonesia	14
Japan	14
Austria	13
Kenya	13
Saudi Arabia	11
Denmark	10
Portugal	10
Belgium	9
Serbia	9
Singapore	9
Czech Republic	8
Norway	8
Switzerland	7
Bangladesh	6
Greece	6
Thailand	6
Turkey	6
Russia	5
Taiwan	5
Trinidad & Tobago	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Estonia	4
Iraq	4
Argentina	3
Chile	3
Ecuador	3
Egypt	3
Israel	3
Poland	3
Slovenia	3
Sri Lanka	3
Ukraine	3
Vietnam	3
Colombia	2
Croatia	2
Honduras	2
Kuwait	2
Lebanon	2
Montenegro	2
Pakistan	2
Peru	2
South Korea	2
Uganda	2
Albania	1
Bahamas	1
Barbados	1
Belarus	1
Cameroon	1 (*)
Cook Islands	1
Costa Rica	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Dominican Republic	1
European Union	1
Guam	1
Guatemala	1
Hungary	1
Libya	1
Liechtenstein	1
Madagascar	1
Morocco	1 (*)
Namibia	1
Zimbabwe	1

Cameroon and Morocco were the only single-view countries in July also. No country is on a three-month streak.

I learn the location of so many minor islands I would otherwise have thought was crud on my computer screen by dragging the window around a little, and vice-versa.

WordPress figures I posted 19,115 words in August, which is my chattiest month this year. It brings my word total for the year to 138,526. Since the debut of the original Card Sharks to the start of September I’ve posted 3,499 things here. They’ve drawn a total of 314,034 views from a recorded 177,643 unique visitors.

If you know someone who could be my elusive reader from Greenland, please let them know about the RSS feed for my essays, the most convenient way to read anything online. Or that they could get essays e-mailed them as I publish them, once a day, slightly later each day of the month, before I fix the typos. Or they can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the right column of this page, and add the page to their WordPress reader. If you don’t know anyone in Greenland, I’m not surprised. I don’t either.

Statistics July: Some Round Numbers

I do like looking at my readership figures, once a month, as it’s a convenient way for me to think that I should be more popular. It also lets me lay out what my plans are for the coming month. This plan is always that I’m going to keep recapping the plots in the story strips, since that’s always the most popular thing I post. Let me start with that, come to think of it. My schedule for the coming weeks is to describe the goings-on in:

• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (9th of August)
• Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (16th of August)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (23rd of August)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (30th of August)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (37th of August)

Going to be a fun month. The Dick Tracy-to-Mary Worth swing is a bunch of strips people are often asking Google about. And, you know, people have been hopping mad about Mary Worth lately, and we’re getting more Wilbur Weston in, my readership prospects are good.

Once again I didn’t get a snapshot exactly at the end of June because I was doing things. But they were different things that I was doing than I was doing at the end of June. I bet the end of this month I get the screenshot exactly on the dot, though. Who ever heard of doing a thing on a Wednesday?

To the specifics, though. There were, WordPress says, 4,727 page views here in July. That’s just five fewer than there were in June. This is below the twelve-month running mean of 5,082.3 views per month, although that figure’s skewed a bit by the spike of readers in April. It is above the running median of 4,585 views per month, suggesting a bit of general growth overall.

There were 2,700 recorded unique visitors, again down a bit from June, but in line with the averages. The running mean for the twelve months leading up to July saw 2,714.6 unique visitors each month. The running median was 2,616.5.

There were 100 likes given around here in July, a second suspiciously round number. This is the first one that looks a bit sad, as it’s below the mean of 154.1 and median of 154.5 likes given in a month on average. And the number of comments — 26 — was similarly way below the running mean of 56.5 and median of 51.5. The implication is that people may see my writings more as something to read than as something to engage with. And that’s not bad, really, as I’ve struggled to engage with things myself lately. Hi, every WordPress blog I’m subscribed to but have left comments in as recently as never.

Despite the lower numbers of likes and comments, stuff got read a good bit around here. These are the posts from July with the greatest number of views, in descending order:

• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Who’s writing Gil Thorp now? April – July 2022
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s drawing Judge Parker now? May – July 2022
• Statistics June: How Much People Wish I Could Have Done Something More About Mary Worth Last Month
• Maybe I’ll Get Into Corporate Logo Design
• In Which I Expect Light Shenanigans With Scattered Tomfoolery

I do expect a Gil Thorp surge for a couple months now, while new author Henry Barajas establishes things like that Gil Thorp flies now and has an unsettled home life.

I look at a map like this and I think is it possible to have at least one country in red for each line of longitude, the whole world round? It’s got to require Greenland to do, right? Anyway so if this is your first encounter with my writing, this photo caption is a good representative one.

81 countries or things as good as countries sent me readers in July, down-ish from June’s 82. 20 of them got a single page view, though, up from 16. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,546
India	169
Canada	152
United Kingdom	136
Australia	98
Italy	67
Germany	53
Brazil	38
France	32
South Africa	25
Singapore	22
Serbia	21
Austria	18
Philippines	18
Denmark	17
Finland	16
Pakistan	16
Poland	16
Spain	14
Sweden	14
Norway	13
Belgium	11
Jamaica	11
Iraq	10
Ireland	10
Japan	10
Mexico	10
Switzerland	10
Netherlands	8
New Zealand	8
Nigeria	8
Croatia	7
Peru	7
El Salvador	6
Argentina	5
Malaysia	5
Portugal	5
Romania	5
Bangladesh	4
Barbados	4
Colombia	4
Greece	4
Israel	4
Russia	4
Saudi Arabia	4
South Korea	4
Thailand	4
Tunisia	4
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Czech Republic	3
Hungary	3
Vietnam	3
Chile	2
Georgia	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Indonesia	2
Macedonia	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Turkey	2
Ukraine	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Algeria	1
Cambodia	1
Cameroon	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Ecuador	1
Egypt	1
Fiji	1
Honduras	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1 (**)
Lebanon	1
Lithuania	1
Mongolia	1
Morocco	1
Namibia	1
Nepal	1
Oman	1
Qatar	1
Taiwan	1
Venezuela	1

Kuwait has given me a single view for three months in a row now. No other country has been a single-view country more than one month in a row. Greenland has resumed not being a country that looks at me at all.

WordPress calculates that I posted 17,264 words in July, an average 556.9 per posting. This is down a little and brings my year-to-date average to 563 words per posting. I’m at 119,411 words posted for the year, as of the start of August.

Between the development of the lunar rovers and the start of August I’ve had 307,659 page views here, from a recorded 174,357 unique visitors. Who’ll be number 175,000? I don’t know. Probably someone from Greenland.

If you’d like your chance at being that reader from Greenland, though, good luck! The best route to reading my essays is to add the RSS feed for my essays to your reader. If you don’t have a reader, but you do have a WordPress account, you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. If you don’t have a WordPress account, you can use the box beneath that to get uncorrected and typeo-ridden posts e-mailed to you the moment they’re published. Or you can just click on a page that looks good and read that. Whatever’s brought you here to read this you could do again tomorrow. And maybe the rest of this month as I finally run out of 1960s Popeye cartoons to watch. I know, I’m baffled that could happen too.

Statistics June: How Much People Wish I Could Have Done Something More About Mary Worth Last Month

I did my best to work out the baffling plot point that Helen Moss, longtime teacher at Santa Rosa Community College, had to leave after her onetime crush Ian Cameron told her to stop being a jerk to his wife. I’m still not confident I have the reason clear, but I offered what I had. And people wanted to know! As I look over what the most popular June 2022-dated postings were here, the last month, my Mary Worth plot recap tops the list. Here’s the five most popular new articles from June:

• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why did Helen Moss have to leave? April – June 2022
• Popeye Now Being Drawn By Someone Younger Than Popeye
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why does The Phantom have an Eden? April – June 2022
• Judge Parker and The Phantom look odd because Mike Manley isn’t drawing them
• Also Here’s One of My Dumber Giggles for the Week

Mind, the most popular thing I had of the entire month was an October 2020 post where I admitted finally getting this one Far Side. People always like hearing when someone else was baffled by a comic strip. It’s one of Gary Larson’s many gifts to us all. Anyway my favorite of the last month remains the resolve to eat Cheese Idaho.

Still, the comic strip talk is always going to be my most popular thing here. Were I to shut down the rest of the blog, that’s the part that would go last. So here’s my plan for what to talk about this coming month, and when:

• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (5 July)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (12 July)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (19 July)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (26 July)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (33 July)

Meanwhile, I still like to keep track of how popular my slightly popular blog is, and how that’s changing. And I share that because somehow that’s usually a well-liked feature too. In June 2022, according to WordPress, I had 4,732 page views here, which is below the running mean of 5,034.2 views for the twelve months leading up to June. It’s above the running median of 4,449 page views, though. These came from 2,742 unique visitors, which is above both the running mean of 2,696.7 and running median of 2,547.5. So, hey, more visitors, all of whom get tired of me faster! That’s a something.

I know, it’s weird that I didn’t get a picture of the readership as of 7:59 PM Eastern Time the 30th of June but, understand, I’ve got stuff to do. Sometimes. Like twice a year or so. It happens.

There were 143 likes given to anything at all over the course of June, which is a little below both the running mean of 153.3 and median of 154.5. And there were 40 comments, which seems like more than I remember, but is below the mean of 56.7 and median of 53, again both of which seem like more than I remember. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

There were 82 countries, our country-like entities, to send me any page views in June. That’s up from May’s figure of 75, if you like. 16 of them sent only a single page view, down from May’s 17. None of these countries was Greenland. I know, I’m feeling it too. Here’s what countries it was:

Country	Readers
United States	3,336
India	219
Australia	169
United Kingdom	168
Canada	146
Brazil	68
Italy	54
Germany	42
El Salvador	35
Sweden	34
Philippines	30
Spain	27
Netherlands	17
Nigeria	17
Romania	17
Serbia	17
France	16
Ireland	16
Japan	16
Mexico	16
Finland	14
Thailand	14
South Africa	13
Norway	11
Vietnam	11
Croatia	10
Kenya	10
Malaysia	10
Singapore	10
Czech Republic	9
Denmark	8
Colombia	7
Austria	6
New Zealand	6
Poland	6
Taiwan	6
Chile	5
Ecuador	5
European Union	5
Hungary	5
Pakistan	5
Peru	5
Switzerland	5
Turkey	5
Albania	4
Bahamas	4
Bangladesh	4
Belgium	4
Egypt	4
Indonesia	4
Sri Lanka	4
Bosnia & Herzegovina	3
Iraq	3
Israel	3
Jamaica	3
Russia	3
Saudi Arabia	3
United Arab Emirates	3
American Samoa	2
Costa Rica	2
Estonia	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Jordan	2
Lebanon	2
Panama	2
Portugal	2
Anguilla	1
Argentina	1
Belarus	1
Bolivia	1
Dominican Republic	1
Ethiopia	1
Greece	1
Guam	1
Kazakhstan	1 (**)
Kuwait	1 (*)
Montenegro	1 (**)
Puerto Rico	1
South Korea	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Tunisia	1
Uruguay	1

This struck me as pretty good coverage from South America but it turns out it’s almost always like that. I’m just not paying attention well enough.

Kazakhstan has been a single-view country for three months running now, even though I’d think Kazakhstan has other things to do than check in on my a very slight bit. Kuwait’s been a single-view country two months in a row now, although I guess maybe they have fewer things to do? Montenegro is also on its third month giving me a single view per month. I don’t know how to much to expect they have to do.

WordPress figures I posted 18,738 words in June, my most talkative month this year. It’s an average 624.6 words per posting, and brings my average for the year up to 564 words per post. This may be too many words. It brings me to 102,147 words for the year 2022, so far. Between the Broadway debut of the musical 1776 and the start of July, I’ve posted 3,437 things to this blog. They’ve attracted a total of something like 302,932 views from 171,984 visitors.

If you’d like to read these posts regularly, I’m flattered. The best route is probably to add the RSS feed for my essays to your reader. If you don’t have a reader, but you do have a WordPress account, you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. If you don’t have a WordPress account, you can use the box beneath that to get posts e-mailed to you the moment they’re published and before I’ve corrected some embarrassing typos. And if none of that works for you, eh, I suppose you know your business. Carry on with what seems reasonable. Thank you.

Statistics May: Finland Doesn’t Love Me Anymore, But …

The subject line gives it away, unless I change the subject line. Another Blog, Meanwhile saw the readership from Finland return to what seems like a normal level after April’s big spike. Without that, and without the number of people looking for my Paas Easter Egg color pictures, the monthly readership figures are more normal.

They’re also lower. There were, according to WordPress, 4,378 page views here in May. That’s a great number compared to, say, 2019. But it’s a fair bit below the running mean of 5,078.5 views per month for the twelve months running up to May. And the running median, less vulnerable to weird fluctuations, of 4,585 views per month. There were 2,501 recorded unique visitors, below the running mean of 2,736.5 and running median of 2,616.5. Not too much lower, though.

I know the plot shows 2,500, but I went back and double-checked, and someone snuck in between when I took this screen shot and when the month ended, by Universal Time, one minute later. So it can happen!

There were 188 likes given in May, a greater number than any month since May 2021 somehow. It’s well above the running mean of 154.3 and running median of 154.5 likes in a month. (And not all these likes went to things published in May.) There were 43 comments, below the mean of 56.3 and median of 53, but still a respectable number as I make these things out to be.

My most popular posts of May were the usual mix of me talking about comic strips or cartoons, with a dose of old-time radio and me generally complaining mixed in:

• Sherman’s Lagoon is on GoComics now, not Comics Kingdom
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Is anything real happening in The Phantom? February – May 2022
• Pine Ridge is up for sale
• 60s Popeye: Popeye And The Polite Dragon, with a shocking revelation about Popeye’s ancestors
• Comics Kingdom Is Never Going to Make Sunday Comics Readable on Computers

My most popular piece of original comic writing was In Which I Am Terror-Stricken, culmination of a set of second thoughts I had about the thing I devoted most of March and April to.

But, as mentioned, it’s the story strip plot recaps that bring so many readers here. My plan for the coming month is to cover these strips, on these dates:

• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (7 June)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (14 June)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (21 June)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (28 June)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (5 July)

As ever, this is subject to change as breaking news warrants.

75 countries sent me page views in May, down from April’s 81. 17 of them were single-view countries, the same number as in April. Here’s the roster of those countries, and take a look at the big exciting news for one of them. Do you spot it? I’ll let you know after the strangely popular table of countries.

Not surprised Bangladesh hasn’t been reading me. They’ve got bigger problems. I assume, anyway. I don’t know but it seems fair to suppose all the other countries out there have bigger problems than would be helped by reading me.

Country	Readers
United States	3,073
United Kingdom	171
India	157
Canada	125
Germany	90
Australia	72
Philippines	51
Brazil	41
Thailand	36
El Salvador	35
Italy	35
Nigeria	32
France	28
Spain	26
Finland	24
South Africa	24
Ireland	22
Sweden	22
Netherlands	21
Singapore	19
Austria	17
Vietnam	17
Malaysia	16
Romania	16
Peru	15
Argentina	12
Japan	11
Colombia	9
Czech Republic	9
Hong Kong SAR China	9
New Zealand	9
Mexico	8
Portugal	8
Norway	7
Denmark	6
Ecuador	6
Greece	6
Switzerland	6
Indonesia	5
Nepal	5
Pakistan	5
Poland	5
European Union	4
Mauritania	4
Russia	4
Saudi Arabia	4
Turkey	4
Venezuela	4
Belgium	3
Chile	3
Croatia	3
Cyprus	3
South Korea	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Bangladesh	2
Jamaica	2
Kenya	2
Puerto Rico	2
Bulgaria	1
Cambodia	1
Egypt	1
Greenland	1
Guatemala	1
Hungary	1
Israel	1
Kazakhstan	1 (*)
Kuwait	1
Lesotho	1
Malta	1
Montenegro	1 (*)
Oman	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Qatar	1 (*)
Serbia	1 (*)
Slovenia	1

Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Qatar, and Serbia sent me a single page view in April also. There’s no countries to have sent me a single page view three months running now. But did you notice it? That’s right, I got me a reader in Greenland! Woo-hoo!

WordPress figures I posted 17,161 words in May, my second-most for any month this year. That’s 553.6 words per posting in May, although my average for the year remains 552 words per posting. Between the start of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and the start of June, I’ve posted 3,407 things to this blog. They’ve drawn 298,200 views from 168,914 visitors.

And I’m happy to have readers, regular or sporadic. The easiest way to read me regularly is to add the RSS feed for essays to whatever your reader is. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one by signing up for a free account at Dreamdwith or Livejournal and put them on your Reading page. If you’ve got a WordPress account, you can click on the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this or any page. If you’ve got an e-mail account, you can use the box beneath that to get posts sent you as they’re published. To read sporadically, carry on with whatever you’ve been doing. It’ll probably work out all right. Thank you.

Statistics April: What Does Everybody In Finland Want With Me?

It’s rare, but now and then this blog gets noticed. Usually it’s someone more popular than me linking to one of the images from my story strip recaps. So, turns out the 10th of April was one of those days. More mysterious is that it was someone in Finland doing it: that day I got 3,405 page views, a number that’s not far off my usual monthly total. This all came from 109 unique visitors, a figure that’s on the high side, but not outrageously so.

Also baffling is I can’t figure what everyone in Finland was looking at. I don’t mean literally everyone in Finland; Finland has a population of something like 5,500,000 people and 3,405 page views isn’t enough. Even if we suppose each page view was shared by a thousand people that’s still only about three-fifths of the population. But it’s still a lot all at once. It wasn’t any of my posts, so it must have been an image. But which one? So if you were one of the three-fifths of the Finland population who looked at something from my blog on this past 10th of April, could you leave a comment? I’m just curious what everyone was looking for.

The effect, anyway, is to give me a weird, distorted readership spike in time to replace the one in April 2021 that’s been distorting my twelve-month running averages. WordPress logged 8,350 page views around here, the second-greatest monthly total on my record. As you’d expect that’s well above the 5,167.9 running mean and 4,585 running median. If we take the Finland spike out, the month turns out to be close to the twelve-month running mean. WordPress figures there were 3,090 unique visitors, which is close to in line with the running mean of 3,028.5 and running median of 2,616.5 visitors.

I’d have liked to have got this screen grab at the moment when April 2022 ended, by WordPress’s clock, but I was doing things that involved not staring at a computer to watch for one particular second of the month. I know, I don’t know what I was thinking.

Likes and comments continue to dwindle out of existence. There were 133 likes given to things in April, and 42 comments. The mean for the twelve months leading up to April was 154.8 likes and 56.1 comments. The median was 154.5 likes and 53 comments.

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So here’s the five most popular posts from April. Stuff from earlier than April was more popular than even the top position, yes. But you don’t need to know that around Easter people find my post about which Paas tablets are which color egg. I am annoyed that the color gnomon I used — the Coke Zero can — got redesigned, though.

• MiSTed: Safety First (part 1 of 16)
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why is the Sunday Phantom illegible now? January – April 2022
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? What is this ‘school management’ thing? January – April 2021
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan? Why is there a superhero in Rex Morgan? January – April 2022
• Statistics Saturday: When Does Palm Sunday Happen?

This is the first time in ages I remember my most popular thing not being comic strip news. That’s sure to change for May, since my schedule for story comic recaps is:

• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (10 May)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (17 May)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (24 May)
• Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (31 May)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (7 June)

I’m aware people really, really want to see The Phantom die already. Again, though, Man Who Cannot Die.

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So even though Finland sent me like 3,250 more page views than usual in a month, it still wasn’t the country to send me the greatest number of page views. The United States was, as it ever is. Here’s the roster of readership by country.

Finally, a challenging sphere-of-influence map for Victoria Revolutions players! It’s been ages.

Country	Readers
United States	3,768
Finland	3,259
United Kingdom	197
Canada	157
India	150
Australia	113
Germany	79
Brazil	58
Sweden	45
Philippines	42
Singapore	37
France	36
Kenya	23
Italy	22
South Africa	21
Colombia	19
Nigeria	19
Denmark	17
Spain	16
Ireland	15
El Salvador	14
Chile	13
Mexico	10
Romania	10
Malaysia	9
United Arab Emirates	9
Czech Republic	8
Peru	8
Taiwan	8
Ecuador	7
Egypt	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Netherlands	7
Norway	7
Russia	7
Poland	6
Saudi Arabia	6
Austria	5
Belgium	5
European Union	5
Pakistan	5
South Korea	5
Switzerland	5
Thailand	5
Argentina	4
Bangladesh	4
Costa Rica	4
Jamaica	4
Japan	4
Lebanon	4
New Zealand	4
Bulgaria	3
Greece	3
Iraq	3
Jordan	3
Kuwait	3
Latvia	3
Ukraine	3
Vietnam	3
Hungary	2
Indonesia	2
Israel	2
Kosovo	2
Portugal	2
Bahrain	1
China	1 (*)
Cyprus	1
Dominican Republic	1
Guadeloupe	1
Guinea	1
Honduras	1
Kazakhstan	1
Mauritius	1
Montenegro	1
Morocco	1
Namibia	1
Nepal	1 (*)
Qatar	1
Serbia	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1 (*)
Venezuela	1

That’s 81 countries altogether, same as March, with 17 of them single-view countries. That’s up from March’s 13. China, Nepal, and Trinidad & Tobago are the only countries to have also sent a single page view in March. No countries are on a three-month streak. I am surprised to have seven page views from Russia, and three from Ukraine. I would have thought people in both countries have anything else to think about than my nonsense.

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WordPress figures I published 16,407 words in April, which is almost suspiciously in line with the rest of the year. It’s the great formalism of that March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing, must be. That and my decision to stop listing every single incident in the story strips in favor of summarizing plots. This all brings me to 66,248 words published for the year, and an average of 552 words per posting.

Between the events of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the start of May, I’ve published 3,376 posts here. They’ve gathered 293,822 page views from 166,414 unique visitors, although have left most of those gathering dust in the linen closet.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, please be one. The RSS feed for essays is at this link, and if you need an RSS reader sign up for a free Dreamwidth account. You can add RSS feeds to your Reading page there. If you’ve got a WordPress account, you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the upper right corner of this page. There’s also a box to have posts e-mailed as they’re published and before I can edit my typos. Thank you for being here and here’s hoping this is a good month ahead.

Statistics March: How Much People Want Me To Explain Comic Strips To Them

For most of March I put a lot of time into the Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing, an ill-defined matchup of items. I figure to do four more of these, so there can be sixteen pairs, which I only just now realize is half the number of first-round contests in the actual March Madness. Well, too late now. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed doing these a lot. It’s fun thinking of good Dadaist pairs, and coming up with two quick jokes on the topics has felt like a good exercise. It’s been a relief, too; as sometimes happens, the tightness of the format makes it easier to write.

Ah, but does anybody else like it? And from looking over WordPress’s statistics, the evidence is people kind of tolerate it. The system records me as having had 4,985 page views in March. This reinforces how I should hit refresh from a private-browsing account fifteen more times each month. This is below my twelve-month running mean, for the months leading up to March 2022, of 5,259.0 views in a month. It’s also a second straight month of decline. However, it is above the twelve-month median, which was 4,585 page views.

There were 2,888 unique visitors, which again is below the twelve-month running mean of 3,087.3 visitors. But it’s also above the running median of 2,616.5. This is all consistent with a slow rise in popularity, muddled by January 2022 having been an unusually popular month around here. That popularity was likely spurred by Mary Worth, which teased us all with the prospect of Wilbur Weston dying in a cruise ship accident. Well, tomorrow I expect to recap Mary Worth again, but sorry to say, Wilbur Weston won’t be dead for it.

Of course the story comics give me a lot of readership, but I am wondering what’s going to happen when I run out of those 1960s King Features Popeye cartoons. And what’ll I review after that? Cartoons people like, instead? … Probably not that.

Still, I can always find something more ambiguous in the data. There were 140 likes given here, in March, which is below both the mean of 153.8 an the median of 154.5. And there were 26 comments given, which is great compared to my mathematics blog. But it’s less than half the usual, where the mean was 60.3 and the median 56.3. This despite the head-to-head nature of the Pairwise Brackety Contest. I’d have imagined that would inspire jumping on to the joke. I always fear that my jokes are too closed, but I also don’t know another way to write.

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Here are the five most popular posts from March. There were a couple posts from before March even more popular, mostly people who wanted the goings-on in Judge Parker explained. We’ll get there soon enough.

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is Savarna trying to destroy The Phantom? December 2021 – February 2022
• March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Contrast vs Feet
• 60s Popeye: Ballet de Spinach, a cartoon without spinach in it
• I See Why Maybe Superman Didn’t Visit All These Kids in the 70s
• Statistics Saturday: Some Signs of Spring

And my plan for this month’s plot recaps for story comics is these strips, in this order:

• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (5 April)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (12 April)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (19 April)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (26 April)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker> (3 May)

This is a pretty high concentration of the strips people really want to know about. I’ve thought some about rearranging the strips to spread the popular things out, but I’m not sure that I could do much better. Dick Tracy hasn’t been a huge attention-getter lately, but it has some hot streaks, you know?

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Hey, it’s an inverse map of the Non-Aligned Movement countries!

There were 81 countries, or things like countries, sending me readers in March. That’s down from 90. Thirteen of them were single-view countries. That’s down from 24. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,466
Canada	207
Brazil	180
India	165
United Kingdom	146
Australia	101
Germany	68
Italy	66
Philippines	58
Hungary	38
Spain	32
Sweden	27
Denmark	20
Egypt	20
France	19
Singapore	19
European Union	18
Finland	18
Ireland	18
Czech Republic	17
Nigeria	17
Mexico	14
Norway	13
Austria	11
Saudi Arabia	11
Japan	10
Kenya	10
Belgium	9
South Africa	9
Malaysia	8
Netherlands	8
Taiwan	8
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Indonesia	7
Jamaica	7
Poland	7
Serbia	7
Turkey	7
Greece	6
Macedonia	6
New Zealand	6
Thailand	6
Ecuador	5
United Arab Emirates	5
El Salvador	4
Guatemala	4
Peru	4
South Korea	4
Argentina	3
Bulgaria	3
Colombia	3
Malawi	3
Mauritius	3
Papua New Guinea	3
Switzerland	3
Costa Rica	2
Croatia	2
Estonia	2
Israel	2
Lebanon	2
Pakistan	2
Portugal	2
Puerto Rico	2
Romania	2
Russia	2
Slovenia	2
Sri Lanka	2
Vietnam	2
Albania	1 (*)
Belarus	1
China	1
Curaçao	1
Ghana	1 (*)
Gibraltar	1
Latvia	1
Morocco	1
Nepal	1
Oman	1 (*)
Palestinian Territories	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Yemen	1

Albania, Ghana, and Oman were single-view countries in February also. No countries are on a three-month streak for sending me single views. I’m surprised to have two views from Russia as I would think they had other things on their mind than whatever the heck Wilbur Weston’s problem is. Maybe they needed the break.

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WordPress calculates that I published 15,472 words in March, an average posting of 499.1 words. This gives me a year-to-date total of 49,841 words published, and an average post length of 554 words.

Between the marriage of Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart and the start of April I’ve published 3,346 things in this blog. They’ve drawn 5,052 comments over the course of 285,472 page views from 163,332 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, I can’t stop you. I can help you a little bit, though. The RSS feed for essays is at this link, and if you need an RSS reader and can’t find one anywhere, try getting a free Dreamwidth account. You can add RSS feeds to your Reading page there. If you’ve got a WordPress account, you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the upper right corner of this page. There’s also a box to have posts e-mailed you as they happen, and before I can edit my typos. I feel awful about that, but I’ve tried copy-editing my posts before they go up, and there’s still errors even in stuff I fixed years ago. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Statistics February: How Much Less People Are Interested in Me When Wilbur Weston’s Not On-Screen

There is no getting around it: people really, really want to follow Wilbur Weston dying. Since my last Mary Worth plot recap, he has not died. He didn’t even get a round of people to start slapping him and never stop, the way he deserved. And with that, my readership has dropped again. So let’s take a look at the specifics.

January 2022 was my most popular month in almost a year. February 2022 was almost suspicious in its averageness. WordPress recorded 5,411 page views here. For the twelve months from February 2021 through January 2022, the mean was 5,206.3 page views and the median 4,585. There were 3,012 unique visitors, down from January again. But the twelve-month running mean was 3,067.9 unique visitors. The median was 2,616.5 visitors. So really this suggests a month with more readers than average, and looking at the graph suggests that.

Mm. Hmm. Hm. How wrong would it be to offer Tony DePaul cash in exchange for having Mozz write up the death of Wilbur Weston? Bear in mind things have been a little tight and I could only go up to $37.25.

The number of likes continued its ongoing decline, to a mere 151 over the month. But the twelve-month running average was 149.7 likes, and the median 149, so, what more could I want? Comments I don’t answer? I got 52 of them (counting my answers), below the running mean of 59.1 and running median of 56.5.

What were the popular things from February? Comic strip talk, obviously. What people wanted to see was Wilbur Weston die, fairly enough. Or to hear whether it’s just them or has Comics Kingdom screwed up its web site. It’s not you. Just go ahead and assume, for all time, that Comics Kingdom has messed something up. So here’s the five most popular things from February and see if you can work out what the readers want to see:

• Statistics January: Nearly 7,000 People Wanted To See Wilbur Weston Die
• Comics Kingdom is still trying to fix things and also get people to read _Animal Crackers_
• Yeah, Comics Kingdom really borked their web site
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Is Terry Beatty trying to upstage you? November 2021 – January 2022
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Why is April angry the show she wanted made got made? November 2021 – February 2022

My most popular piece that was not based on comic strips? That would be In Which I Am Looking for a Peer Reviewer and reveal that I’m spending my days watching Buzzr instead of doing anything else. I’m sorry, but Celebrity Whew! is a crackling good watch. Also, I believe I have worked out a scenario in which a contestant on Card Sharks could run out of cards, but I want to confirm my reasoning before publishing my results.

My schedule for the story comic plot recaps, for the coming month, is this:

• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (8 March)
• Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (15 March)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (22 March)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (29 March)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (5 April)

All of that is subject to breaking news, of course. But all the story strip plot recaps are at this link, if you want to be sure you miss none of them.

Also coincidentally a map of the telegraph-connected world as of 1872.

There were fully 90 countries sending me readers in February, up from January’s figure. 24 of them were single-view countries, a substantial jump percentage-wise from January’s 17. Here’s the roster of those figures:

Country	Readers
United States	4,219
India	195
Canada	144
United Kingdom	123
Australia	78
Germany	62
Philippines	56
Brazil	49
Sweden	41
Italy	28
Spain	26
Finland	25
Mexico	24
Japan	21
Ireland	18
Turkey	18
Colombia	15
France	15
Russia	15
Egypt	13
Nigeria	13
Belgium	10
Poland	10
Saudi Arabia	9
Argentina	8
Norway	7
Vietnam	7
Costa Rica	6
Singapore	6
Switzerland	6
Uruguay	6
Bulgaria	5
Ecuador	5
Greece	5
Malaysia	5
New Zealand	5
Thailand	5
Barbados	4
Cyprus	4
Czech Republic	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Indonesia	4
Netherlands	4
Pakistan	4
Peru	4
Puerto Rico	4
South Africa	4
Guatemala	3
Portugal	3
Romania	3
Slovakia	3
U.S. Virgin Islands	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Austria	2
Azerbaijan	2
Denmark	2
Israel	2
Kenya	2
Kuwait	2
Luxembourg	2
Macedonia	2
Malta	2
Mongolia	2
South Korea	2
Taiwan	2
Venezuela	2
Albania	1
American Samoa	1
Anguilla	1
Bangladesh	1
Belize	1
Bolivia	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Brunei	1
Cambodia	1
Cameroon	1
Cuba	1
Estonia	1 (*)
Ethiopia	1
European Union	1
Ghana	1
Hungary	1
Lebanon	1
Libya	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Oman	1
Papua New Guinea	1
Paraguay	1
Slovenia	1
Ukraine	1

Estonia was the only country to send me a single page view in January also. There’s no countries on a three-month streak of reading me as slightly as possible.

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WordPress figures that I published 16,171 words in February. That’s an average of 577.5 words per posting, both figures down from January but not by much. The average to date this year dropped from 587 words per post to 583.

Between the launch of Voyager 2 in 1977 and the start of March there were 3,315 posts in this blog, which drew a total of 200,487 views from 160,436 unique visitors. And they drew 5,026 comments altogether. I don’t know which one was the 5,000th. I also don’t know if that counts the ‘Pending’ ones that I’m pretty sure are spam but can’t bring myself to delete. Also a couple from people who wanted to give me a not-for-publication comment or correction.

If you’d like to be a commenter, please say something. If you’d like to be a reader, please read. The RSS feed for my essays is this link. Or you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the upper-right corner of this page, and get it in your WordPress reader. You can also use the subscription box to get posts e-mailed to you in that narrow window between my scheduled post and my first round of typo corrections. I don’t do anything with your e-mails besides have WordPress send out posts, but I can’t say anything about what WordPress does with them. Sorry.

Statistics January: Nearly 7,000 People Wanted To See Wilbur Weston Die

One hates to be morbid. But it’s hard not to notice how many people come visit my blog here because they suspect a comic strip character is going to die. The Phantom’s projected death has brought hundreds of page views around here in recent months. Wilbur Weston falling from a cruise ship to wash ashore on an unknown island? That’s brought even more. It also looks like somebody on Facebonk mentioned me in some way that made people curious. So that’s all pleasant enough for me. Not so good for Wilbur.

My readership jumped considerably in January, rising to 6,892 page views from 3,853 unique visitors, as WordPress counts things. That’s well above the twelve-month running mean for January through December 2021, which was 5,055.4 page views per month from 3,004.7 unique visitors. It’s also well above the running median of 4,585 page views from 2,616.5 unique visitors. This will all die down as Wilbur Weston does not.

I don’t feel bad about missing 7,000 by 108 page views like this. If I had missed by eight, now, that I’d be fuming about until I remembered absolutely anything else going on these days.

The things suggesting engagement were up, but not much. There were 158 likes given in January, compared to a running mean of 148.4 and running median of 141.5. There were 59 comments, compared to a running mean of 58.2 and running median of 52.5. And some of that was passing messages on to people. Well, it’s all content, say people who write algorithms instead of read.

My most popular post in January was this past October’s Mary Worth plot recap, because it asked how Wilbur Weston could be so incompetent. By far. It was almost twice as popular as the second-place finisher. My most popular posts from January were also Wilbur-centered. And the rest? Here’s the five most popular things published this past month:

• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why does everybody want Wilbur dead? October 2021 – January 2022
• Statistics December: How Can I Care About December 2021 When Wilbur Weston Might Be Dead?
• Wait, did Funky Winkerbean just give his wife the helmet Bull Bushka died in?
• Where did _Baby Blues_ go? How can I express my anger at _Funky Winkerbean_?
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? How many ritual responsibilities does The Phantom have? October 2021 – January 2022

It does all suggest that people know what they like from me, and it’s me talking about comic strips. Sometimes without even complaining about them. Granted, yes, it’s fun and funny to complain about the trivial. Anyway, TCM (United States feed) is showing Please Don’t Eat The Daisies this Sunday, and I might catch that again. Among original, non-comic-strip writing Statistics Saturday: Gifts Given for Squirrel Appreciation Day This Year was my most popular thing this past month.

Still, I’d be quite the fool to drop my story strip plot recaps. All the story strip recaps should be gathered here. And my plan for the next couple weeks is to cover:

• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (8 February)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (15 February)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (22 February)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (29 February)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (36 February)

So if I’m reading this map right, Alaska is strawberry-flavored. Can somebody go and lick it for me?

Once again 80 countries or country-like entities sent me page views. 17 of them were single-view countries, down from December’s 18. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	5,059
India	239
Canada	238
United Kingdom	191
Australia	131
Bulgaria	116
Japan	82
Brazil	63
Finland	57
Germany	57
Sweden	56
Philippines	51
Italy	48
Austria	36
France	33
Ireland	30
Spain	29
Thailand	28
Portugal	24
Denmark	18
New Zealand	17
Singapore	17
Egypt	14
Romania	13
Argentina	12
Indonesia	12
Israel	11
Netherlands	11
South Africa	11
Turkey	11
Hong Kong SAR China	10
Macedonia	10
Malaysia	8
Peru	8
Venezuela	8
Nigeria	7
Belgium	6
Mauritius	6
Mexico	6
Norway	6
Poland	6
Taiwan	6
Costa Rica	5
Ecuador	5
Greece	5
South Korea	5
Switzerland	5
European Union	4
Hungary	4
Lithuania	4
Pakistan	4
China	3
Croatia	3
Czech Republic	3
Puerto Rico	3
Saudi Arabia	3
Trinidad & Tobago	3
Ukraine	3
Bangladesh	2
Chile	2
Russia	2
Serbia	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Barbados	1
Colombia	1
Estonia	1
Guadeloupe	1 (*)
Iraq	1
Jamaica	1
Kosovo	1
Kuwait	1
Luxembourg	1
Mongolia	1
Namibia	1
Panama	1
Sri Lanka	1
St. Lucia	1
Uganda	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1 (*)

Guadeloupe and Vietnam were the only single-view countries on a two-month streak. Nobody’s on a three-month single-view streak.

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WordPress figures that I published 18,198 words in December. (I reused a bunch of words, though.) This puts me at an average 587 words per posting this year, though I expect that figure to change. I’m not going to do the work needed to keep it constant.

Between the debut of short-lived game show Whew! and the start of February I’ve published 3,287 things to this blog. They’ve drawn a total 275,048 views from 157,401 unique visitors, they figure. And, for what it’s worth, a total of 4,974 comments. This suggests lucky comment #5,000 might come to the blog this month. It’s going to be people asking why Wilbur Weston isn’t dead.

If you’re looking to be a reader there’s nothing you need to do but read. If you’d like to use your RSS reader to get posts, here’s the feed. If you want to subscribe, there’s the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ button at the upper-right corner of this and every post. And just beneath that is a box to have posts e-mailed to you. I don’t do anything with that e-mail address except send posts. I can’t say what WordPress does with your address. Leave them in the junk drawer with a promise to do something about them soon, is what I would do with them.

Statistics 2021: At Last, How The Old Year Liked Me Writing About _The Phantom_

I have not been avoiding a check back on the past year, to see what WordPress figures my readership was like. I simply have had that thing happen where I get up, have lunch, do three things, and then it’s 11 pm. You may have noticed this in your own lives, depending on when you have lunch.

WordPress figures there were 60,665 pages viewed here in all of 2021. That’s the largest number of page views I’ve gotten any year, to date. These views came from 36,061 unique visitors, as WordPress counts visitors. That, too, is the largest number of unique visitors I’ve gotten in a year. I owe it all to talking about comic strips.

Not to brag but do you have any idea how many extrapolations I, using my mathematical training, could make from a data set as small as this? And how bad all these conclusions would be? It’s thrilling stuff.

As measures of engagement go? 2021 saw some rises here. There were 1,772 things liked during the year, well above 2020 and my highest count since 2018. And there were 700 comments, not just a nice round number but more than 2019 and 2020 gave me combined. (2018, again, was higher still, but 2018 was a better year for most people than 2021 was.) I owe it all to talking about comic strips.

I mean that last with typical literalness. The five most popular things I posted in 2021 were:

• The comic strip Buckles is ending in like eight minutes
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Who is Towns Ellerbee? October 2020 – January 2021
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Are we about to see the death of the 21st Phantom? June – September 2021
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Where did Randy Parker vanish to? March – June 2021
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Is The Phantom about to die? April – June 2021

I would be nowhere if people weren’t curious about The Phantom.

My most popular piece that wasn’t about comic strips was 60s Popeye: Myskery Melody, a cartoon people have been asking for. This is also gratifying. The 60s cartoons are not regarded as important even to fans of Popeye. I’m glad to know that there are people who’ll pay attention if you give serious consideration to the pop-culture footnotes.

My most popular piece not tied to a review or recap was A question created when I was looking up _The Odd Couple_, a serendipitous event. I’ve been reading an early-90s encyclopedia of cartoon animals and yesterday came across its entry about The Oddball Couple, the cartoon I can’t believe existed. Even this independent evidence of its existence doesn’t convince me.

I went all 2021 without doing any original long-form essays. In its place was Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction. The most popular piece of that was MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter XIX. I don’t know how that of all the chapters got the top

I don’t know how long I’ll go on posting MiSTings. They offer the considerable advantage that I know how to write them when I don’t feel much like writing. But all the Mystery Science Theater 3000 stuff I gather at this link. And the thing everyone really wants from me, the story strip recaps, are all gathered at this link. There are also individual links for all the story strips, by title. The Phantom is here, and the other ten story strips I’m still covering have their own tags. Yes, I’m also bothered by how Wilbur Weston returned home in Mary Worth today.

It’s always obvious how I never get readers from Greenland. But did you know I never get readers from Togo, Benin, Chad, or the Central African Republic? Equatorial Guinea has no interest in my writing either.

There were 157 countries or things as good as countries to send me some page views in all 2021. Here’s the roster as WordPress makes them out:

Country	Readers
United States	42,643
India	2,412
Canada	2,309
United Kingdom	1,755
Australia	1,413
Germany	1,022
Philippines	853
Brazil	762
Sweden	438
Italy	437
Spain	414
Finland	351
France	346
South Africa	328
Ireland	242
Norway	224
Mexico	213
Japan	210
Malaysia	182
Indonesia	176
Greece	168
Netherlands	159
Romania	144
Ecuador	138
Singapore	128
Denmark	127
Austria	124
New Zealand	121
Portugal	117
Thailand	105
Nigeria	96
European Union	92
Argentina	91
Peru	90
Russia	87
Switzerland	87
Turkey	87
United Arab Emirates	80
South Korea	77
Poland	73
Sri Lanka	70
Saudi Arabia	65
Israel	63
Belgium	62
Kuwait	61
Chile	59
El Salvador	58
Colombia	55
Hong Kong SAR China	55
Egypt	53
Serbia	53
Taiwan	53
Jamaica	46
Oman	46
Puerto Rico	46
Hungary	41
Pakistan	41
Czech Republic	40
Trinidad & Tobago	37
Kenya	35
Latvia	34
Lebanon	31
Vietnam	28
Croatia	27
Ukraine	24
Jordan	23
Bangladesh	21
Bulgaria	21
Iceland	20
Macedonia	19
Qatar	19
China	18
Venezuela	17
Iraq	16
Costa Rica	15
Georgia	15
Paraguay	14
Bahrain	13
Lithuania	13
Montenegro	13
Guadeloupe	12
Malta	12
Barbados	11
Slovakia	10
Bosnia & Herzegovina	9
Mauritius	9
Albania	8
Algeria	8
Bahamas	8
Belarus	8
Morocco	8
Cayman Islands	7
Estonia	7
Fiji	7
French Guiana	7
Macau SAR China	7
Nepal	7
Papua New Guinea	7
Cambodia	6
Guatemala	6
Panama	6
Zimbabwe	6
Belize	5
Dominican Republic	5
Libya	5
Mongolia	5
Slovenia	5
Uruguay	5
American Samoa	4
Bolivia	4
Brunei	4
Cape Verde	4
Guam	4
Guernsey	4
Maldives	4
St. Lucia	4
Tunisia	4
Cyprus	3
Honduras	3
Namibia	3
St. Vincent & Grenadines	3
Sudan	3
Tanzania	3
Bermuda	2
Burundi	2
Cameroon	2
Guyana	2
Isle of Man	2
Madagascar	2
Moldova	2
Senegal	2
Uzbekistan	2
Åland Islands	1
Armenia	1
Azerbaijan	1
Bhutan	1
Botswana	1
Cook Islands	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Cuba	1
Dominica	1
Ethiopia	1
Ghana	1
Jersey	1
Kyrgyzstan	1
Liberia	1
Liechtenstein	1
Luxembourg	1
Malawi	1
Mauritania	1
Nicaragua	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Sint Maarten	1
Somalia	1
St. Martin	1
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Uganda	1

I had no page views from the Vatican in 2021. I’m less surprised by that than I am by having had one page view from the Vatican on my mathematics blog. They have to have better things to worry about than what the current story in Gil Thorp is.

WordPress figures I posted a total of 269,360 words in 2021, for an average of 738 words per posting. That’s my most verbose year on record, which reflects how much bulk goes into the various MiSTings. Each post got, on average, 4.5 likes and 2.2 comments.

If you’d like to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile, it’s easy enough to do. There’s a button labelled “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” in the upper right corner of the page. You can also subscribe for e-mail delivery of articles at they post. I do nothing with the e-mail address besides have the WordPress Corporation send them out. I can’t say what else the WordPress Corporation does with them. If you have an RSS reader, you can use the feed https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed and read without showing up in my statistics.

Whatever way you read, though, I appreciate your doing. Thank you and I hope all’s going okay for you.

Statistics December: How Can I Care About December 2021 When Wilbur Weston Might Be Dead?

Yes, yes, I, like everyone who’s reading Mary Worth, am excited to see Wilbur Weston’s fallen off a cruise ship. I’m hoping to get to recapping it next week, when we might know whether he’s dead or what. Let me share what my plan is for comic strip recaps, before I get into anything further here:

• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (11 January)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (18 January)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (25 January)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (1 February)

I’m willing to chance the schedule when circumstances warrant. But, for now, yes, Wilbur Weston has fallen into the sea in what might be the first Mary Worth death since the legendary Aldo Keldrast. We’ll see. All my recaps of what’s going on in the story strips are at this link.

Still, I do like sharing my readership figures around here, for reasons I can never quite articulate. I guess other bloggers like the reassurance that it’s not them, their readership has fallen off since a couple years ago.

1,389 followers! If they were all lined up behind me, they’d bump into the wall. Our living room isn’t that large.

In a reversal of the pattern since 2018, my readership increased from November to December 2021. The total number of page views for the month increased to 4,492. This is below the twelve-month running mean of 5,161.0, though, and also below the running median of 4,728. April was a very popular month around here, thanks in part to my post about which Paas tablet matches which color egg. Also to people wanting to know what was going on with The Phantom, a reliable source of readers this year.

The number of unique visitors rose too, again reversing the usual November-to-December trend. There were 2,568 recorded unique visitors in December, but this again is below the running mean of 3,072.4 and the median of 2,722.5. Liking me (nb not licking) was above the averages, though, with 166 likes given in the month. The mean for the twelve months ending with November 2021 was 145.3 likes, and the median 138.5. Comments were about average: 51 given around here in the month, compared to a mean of 55.4 and a median of 51. Certainly average enough.

My most popular post from December was comic strip based, of course. And I’ve been making more short, punchy little posts that have been well-received. I like this, since I like anything being well-received, and short stuff is quicker to write. I wanted to share the five most popular things from December and there was, naturally, a tie for fifth. So here’s the top several things:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Why should we read this imaginary story? September – December 2021
• In which Comics Kingdom has a thrilling offer for me
• The Holidays in Order of Their _Peanuts_ Special
• Although I want to feel cheer that it’s Friday
• In which I am dissatisfied with my own habits
• MiSTed: GALACTIC FEDERATION Update (Part 4 of 4)
• What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? What’s the story with Morgan Le Fay? September – December 2021

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Hey, I’ve almost got the Pacific Ocean surrounded! It’s almost impossible that it should sneak out now!

There were 80 countries sending me any page views at all in December. Greenland was not among them. Here’s the countries that were:

Country	Readers
United States	3199
India	171
Canada	153
United Kingdom	132
Australia	121
Germany	79
Japan	60
Philippines	50
Italy	41
Brazil	38
Ireland	27
Sweden	27
Spain	26
Nigeria	21
Norway	21
Netherlands	18
France	15
Sri Lanka	14
Finland	13
New Zealand	13
Thailand	13
Egypt	12
Mexico	12
Peru	12
South Africa	12
Indonesia	11
Malaysia	10
Russia	10
Switzerland	10
Taiwan	10
Austria	9
Romania	8
Singapore	7
Belarus	6
Paraguay	6
Denmark	5
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Portugal	5
Saudi Arabia	5
Bulgaria	4
Colombia	4
Greece	4
Jordan	4
Kenya	4
Puerto Rico	4
South Korea	4
Iraq	3
Jamaica	3
Poland	3
Trinidad & Tobago	3
Ukraine	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Belgium	2
Cambodia	2
Croatia	2
Georgia	2
Israel	2
Kuwait	2
Macedonia	2
Montenegro	2
Pakistan	2
Turkey	2
Albania	1
Azerbaijan	1
Belize	1
Chile	1
China	1
Costa Rica	1
Côte d’Ivoire	1
Ecuador	1
El Salvador	1
Guadeloupe	1
Guam	1
Honduras	1
Hungary	1
Lebanon	1 (*)
Serbia	1
Slovakia	1
Tunisia	1
Vietnam	1

Of the 18 single-view countries (up from 14 in November) only Lebanon is on a two-month streak. Nobody’s on an even longer streak.

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Wordpress figures that I posted 18,853 words in December. Even though those were not all different words, that was still my second-least-loquacious month in 2021. This was an average of 608.2 words per posting. And it brought me to a total for the year of 269,360 words, averaging 738 words per posting.

Between the discovery of the English Channel and the 1st of January I’ve posted 3,256 things to this blog. They’ve drawn 268,184 views from 153,567 unique visitors. And there were 4,915 comments overall, some of which I should get around to reading one of these days.

For Those Waiting for My Statistics December Post

I know there’s people wondering where my exploration of the readership statistics the past month is. It’s always, somehow, my most-liked thing of the month. I think readers like to see whether this will be the time I get a reader from Greenland. It will not be. But I’ve been slow to get around to it, and I’ll share why: I’m still waiting for December 2021 to get better. And it sees determined to not. This leaves me … you know, I’m not disappointed, I’m just angry with it. I have similar issues with 2021 as a whole. I’ll give it a little more time to pick up and then just share the sad state of things as-is.

Statistics October: How October 2021 Trick-Or-Treated My Humor Blog

Oh, I like that subject line. I should have thought of something Halloween-themed for last month. Ah well. There’ll be another October, someday, although there’s no knowing when. (We say this to make October feel more sneaky. Don’t let it know we almost always find it right past September and short of the Moon.)

October saw a slight rise in readership around here. There were 4,355 page views recorded from 2,410 unique visitors. However, that’s still got the blog below the twelve-month running averages. From October 2020 through September 2021 the blog had a mean 5,565.1 views from 3,341.4 unique visitors. I mean arithmetic mean. Few of them were hostile. The running median was 4,996 views from 3,036.5 unique visitors. I can’t explain this dropping off except that it could be people aren’t thrilled to see plot recaps of forgotten Talkartoons that they already saw three years ago.

Or they are. There were 161 likes given in the past month. That’s a fair bit above the running mean of 138.1 per month, or the running median of 135 per month. It was chatty, too, with 62 comments given, above the mean of 52.6 and median of 45.5. That’s the fourth-chattiest month in a couple years now.

WordPress suggests I “grow my audience with a podcast” and I can’t think of one to do except maybe a pop-culture hangout podcast about the podcasts I already listen to. There are probably a bunch of those already and if I started one of my own, I would get hurt.

The most popular posts from October were the set one might expect, mostly comic strip recaps and complaints:

• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is there time travel now? July – October 2021
• How Angry Should You Be About the _Crankshaft_ and _Funky Winkerbean_ Stories Not Being Done YET?
• Reposted: The 33rd Talkartoon: The Robot, surely Not A Time-Traveller’s Prankish Insertion To History
• What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Are new people taking over the comic? October 2021
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? What happened between Diana Daggers and Bee Sharp? July – October 2021

While Crankshaft has moved on to a different story, I don’t get how that’s still going on either.

The most popular piece of all was the September 2021 plot recap for The Phantom, weekday continuity. In it, it did look as though The Phantom might die. My most popular piece intended to be funny and posted in October were these selections from my library.

But my story comic recaps will stay the most popular things around this blog. My schedule for the next couple weeks is:

• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (9 November)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (16 November)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (23 November)
• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (30 November)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (7 December)

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I understand how parochial my blog is. But as far as I can tell I’ve never gotten a single reader from Chad, Niger, or the Central African Republic and you’d think that would have happened at least by chance, wouldn’t you? Someone clicking something by mistake? But I suppose the people in Africa know what they’re doing.

There were 71 countries, or things as good as countries, sending me page views in October. 14 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the aways popular roster of them:

Country	Readers
United States	2,952
Canada	157
India	147
Australia	125
Philippines	114
United Kingdom	96
Sweden	86
Germany	67
Brazil	66
France	40
Spain	40
Finland	30
El Salvador	27
Ireland	27
Serbia	24
Ecuador	23
Mexico	22
Italy	21
South Africa	17
Japan	16
Argentina	15
Austria	15
Indonesia	15
Peru	14
Netherlands	10
Romania	10
South Korea	10
European Union	9
New Zealand	9
Thailand	9
Czech Republic	8
Lebanon	8
Israel	7
Kenya	7
Malaysia	7
Poland	7
Portugal	7
Singapore	6
Turkey	6
Barbados	5
Chile	5
Colombia	5
Jamaica	5
Malta	5
Nigeria	5
Guadeloupe	4
Hungary	4
Norway	4
Switzerland	4
Belgium	3
Croatia	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
China	2
Egypt	2
Estonia	2
Taiwan	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Bulgaria	1
Costa Rica	1
Denmark	1
Greece	1
Guatemala	1 (*)
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1
Madagascar	1
Pakistan	1
Puerto Rico	1 (*)
Qatar	1
Russia	1
Ukraine	1
United Arab Emirates	1

Guatemala and Puerto Rico were single-view countries in September also. Nothing has been a single-view country three months in a row.

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WordPress is of the opinion I published 21,001 words in October. That’s an average of 677.5 words per posting in the month. This is also well down from September and most of the rest of the year. This shows the power of switching from nothing but long recaps of cartoons to photographs with two sentences setting them up. Also to using much shorter MiSTing segments than I had been. I am up to 227,572 words posted this year, so far, an average of 749 words per posting.

Between the original theatrical release of Young Frankenstein and the start of November I’ve posted 3,195 things to this blog. They’ve drawn a total 259,464 views from 148,630 unique visitors. WordPress also claims I have 1,370 followers, although I suspect not all of them are following that closely.

If you’d like to follow more closely, you can try increasing your browser’s zoom on this page. It’s almost as good as shrinking. If you’d like to add this to your WordPress reading page, click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” sticker on the upper right corner of this page. If you’d like to get them by e-mail, you can use the panel underneath that. I won’t do anything with your e-mail address except send posts as they’re published, but I can’t say what WordPress plans to do with them.

For more private reading (not even showing up in my statistics), you can add the RSS feed for posts to your reader. If you need an RSS reader can get one at This Old Reader or at NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal and use their friends pages. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds, not just mine, there.

And thank you for whatever kind of interaction we’re having here.

Statistics September: How The Past Month Treated My Humor Blog

Since the month (October) is a third done it’s time I finally got around to looking at how it fared in September. The faring was … fair, about four-fifths of the faring I’d fain see. Page reads, and unique visitors, were down, to the lowest values they’ve had in over a year. I’m sure part of that is that I had to shift into reposting my reviews of Talkartoons, a thing that does not appeal to my key demographic, who is my Dad. I’m sorry for this, but have had to ration my energies and I’ll open up to more new-ish material as I’m able.

There were 4,080 pages viewed around here in September. That’s well below the twelve-month running mean leading up to September of 5,598.3 views per month. The median, a measure of average-ness less fooled by extreme events, was 4,996 for the twelve months ending the 1st of September. So, yeah, that’s a drop. There were 2,119 logged unique visitors, well below the twelve-month running mean of 3,383.4 visitors, or the running median of 3,306.5 visitors.

I guess I did only check near the start of the last minute of September, Greenwich Time. Maybe a couple hundred views came in between 7:59:10 and 7:59:59. It’s too bad there’s no way to know.

Still, the people who came here stayed about as involved as usual, so, thank you, Garrison. There were 133 likes given to posts in September, a figure indistinguishable from the running mean of 137.8 per month or median of 135 per month. And there were 35 comments, below the running mean of 53.1 and median of 45.5, but still. That’s pretty good considering what are people supposed to do, say “No, this isn’t a Betty Boop cartoon”? If that’s important toyou then fine, but it’s not that interesting.

499 specific posts got any page views at all in September. The most popular things posted in September were:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Are we about to see the death of the 21st Phantom? June – September 2021 (which was also the most popular thing posted at all. It even beat out even that months-of-the-year-in-reverse-alphabetical-order piece. No, the Phantom is not dying for realsies, not right now anyway)
• Reposted: The 26th Talkartoon: Minding The Baby, where Betty got her name
• Statistics Saturday: Trivia about The Facts Of Life I’ve been having a hard time dealing with this week
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? What happened to Randy Parker? June – August 2021
• Statistics Saturday: Some Cartoons In Which Popeye Does Not Each Spinach

My most popular feature around here is the comic strip plot recaps. You can read all my story strip plot recaps at this tag. My plan for specific strips for the coming month are to cover:

• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (12 October)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (19 October)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (26 October)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (2 November)

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Some month I’m just going to do a post that lists countries that don’t read me and test whether that makes any difference. (It won’t.)

A mere 69 countries or country-like organizations sent me readers in September. 13 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	2,672
India	196
Canada	172
Brazil	145
Australia	107
Sweden	96
United Kingdom	85
Philippines	81
Spain	49
Germany	48
Norway	39
Italy	38
Finland	27
South Africa	26
Greece	24
Austria	17
Ecuador	16
Ireland	16
Argentina	15
France	15
Malaysia	14
Mexico	13
European Union	12
Russia	12
Thailand	9
Netherlands	8
Belgium	7
Israel	7
New Zealand	7
Romania	7
Singapore	7
Turkey	7
Indonesia	6
Pakistan	6
Guadeloupe	5
Japan	5
Jamaica	4
Poland	4
United Arab Emirates	4
Colombia	3
El Salvador	3
Kenya	3
Nigeria	3
Serbia	3
Switzerland	3
Taiwan	3
Bahrain	2
Bangladesh	2
Bermuda	2
Denmark	2
Guernsey	2
Peru	2
Sri Lanka	2
Ukraine	2
Brunei	1
Czech Republic	1
Egypt	1
Estonia	1
Guatemala	1
Hungary	1
Iceland	1
Malawi	1
Nepal	1
Puerto Rico	1
Slovakia	1
South Korea	1
St. Vincent & Grenadines	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

None of September’s single-reader countries were also a single-reader country in August. That’s the first clean sweep to happen since August.

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WordPress flatters me by claiming I published 31,546 words in September. This is an average of 1,051.5 words per posting and my most loquacious month this year. It’s a fib, of course, the numbers padded by both the MiSTings, with many words I did not write, and the Talkartoons recaps, with many words I wrote years ago. So be it. It brings my total for the year up to 206,571 words posted, with an average 757 words per posting for 2021.

Between the first time humans and monkeys flew into space on the same vehicle (April 1985, aboard the space shuttle Challenger) and the start of October I’ve posted 3,164 things to this blog. They’e drawn 255,108 views from 146,221 unique visitors. WordPress says I have 1,363 followers here, and like you, I don’t believe it.

Still, if you’d like to be the 1,364 follower, I’d be glad to have you. First, try as hard as you can to exist. Then click on the ‘Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile’ sticker in the upper right corner of this page, which adds this to your WordPress Reader. Or if you prefer getting the versions that have all the typos, you can use the panel beneath that to get posts by e-mail. I don’t ever send anything else by e-mail, but I can’t say what WordPress will do with your address.

If you’d like to read these essays in private, you can add the RSS feed for Another Blog, Meanwhile to whatever your news reader is. If you need an RSS reader you can try This Old Reader, for example, NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

However it is you’re reading me, though, thank you, whether or not you exist.

Statistics August: How August 2021 Treated My Humor Blog

August 2021 was a bad month for me. I don’t wish to get too personal here. But you see how bad it was from my mid-month crashing out of reviewing 60s Popeye cartoons. The Popeye cartoon reviews were already a thing I did to conserve energy, so you see how bad it’s been I had to switch to reposting old Talkartoon reviews. I hope that things are getting better, and that I’ll be able to get back at least to the Popeye-reviewing. However, I intend to rerun all the rest of my Talkartoon essays to give myself time to recover. Between those and the MiSTings, right now, the only things I’m writing each week are the Statistics Saturday and the What’s Going On In story strip recaps. That feels as much as I can commit to right now.

How did a month with such a limited creative output work out? To my surprise, it brought more readers than the previous several months did. Here’s the numbers:

Some may ask why I do these monthly recaps that are alla bout myself. One answer is that they’re not hard to do and they prove strangely popular. Another is that I want to reassure other WordPress blogger that it’s not you, the whole platform is slowly dying and nobody knows what to do about it.

So there were 4,678 page views in August. That’s below the twelve-month running mean of 5,565.3 for the twelve months leading up to August 2021. That figure’s a little distorted from April, when one of my images was posted in a Fandom Drama thread on Reddit and I got spurious hits. But it’s also below the twelve-month running median of 4,996 views. Medians are less vulnerable to fluke events.

There were 2,665 unique visitors in August. That’s below the running mean of 3,365.8, again affected by that Reddit thread. It’s also below the median of 3,036.5 unique visitors, though, suggesting people are not actually that interested in four-year-old reviews of Bimbo cartoons. Their loss.

And maybe they are interested anyway. There were 137 likes given to posts in August, which is almost dead on the averages. The twelve-month running mean was 135.1 likes, and the median 132 likes for a month. There were 63 comments given in August, above the running mean of 51.0 and the running median of 42.

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None of the Talkartoon reposts have been among my most popular posts for August. No, what people did want to see were these, and fair enough:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What is this Visitor the Phantoms keep getting? May – August 2021
• 60s Popeye: Popeye and the Magic Hat; yes, this is finally the one where Popeye’s a giraffe
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why are Shauna and Ashlee fighting so much? May – July 2021
• Statistics Saturday: Apollo 15 By The Numbers
• 60s Popeye: Sea Hagracy, and do you understand what that title is riffing on?

My story comic summaries are still the backbone of my popularity here. And I still feel enough energy to write them. My plan for the next month is to do these recaps:

• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (7 September)
• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (14 September)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (21 September)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (28 September)
• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (5 October)

The Amazing Spider-Man recap I intend to be the last one I do, unless the strip somehow emerges from reruns, or jumps around in the rerun cycle. This because the strip has reached the point where I started doing recaps back in 2017. Though I could do a better job recapping these strips now, my alternative is to do less job.

That is unless I decide to replace Spider-Man with another strip to recap. I’ve held off on Rip Haywire, partly because I had felt it was driven more by the comedy than the plot. But, heck, I don’t complain about Alley Oop being a comedy-adventure strip. I suppose I feel my dividing line is story strips that appear in newspapers and I’m not sure whether Rip Haywire does. That division is arbitrary, yes, but I want some compelling rule that explains why I won’t do, like, Endtown or The Martian Confederacy.

---

98 countries or country-like entities sent me readers in August. 18 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the map, and here’s the table listing them:

Oh, I just missed out on a complete South America. You know, if you complete a continent (Australia excepted) they put you on the Freshly Pressed page. Also, is the Freshly Pressed page still a thing? I never got on it and I never see blogs boast about having been on it anymore.

Country	Readers
United States	2,969
India	233
Canada	198
United Kingdom	195
Australia	69
Brazil	61
Germany	57
Spain	57
South Africa	49
Italy	37
Kuwait	37
Philippines	37
Saudi Arabia	37
Sweden	35
Austria	32
Turkey	32
Finland	29
France	28
Nigeria	27
Mexico	26
Japan	21
Ireland	18
Ecuador	17
New Zealand	17
Denmark	15
Malaysia	14
Peru	14
Taiwan	14
Indonesia	13
Israel	13
Norway	13
Qatar	12
Colombia	11
Romania	11
South Korea	11
Thailand	11
Argentina	10
Jordan	10
Oman	10
Russia	10
Egypt	9
Lebanon	9
Netherlands	7
Greece	6
Macau SAR China	6
Pakistan	6
Bulgaria	5
Hungary	5
Paraguay	5
Portugal	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Algeria	4
Belgium	4
Czech Republic	4
Hong Kong SAR China	4
Lithuania	4
Montenegro	4
Nepal	4
Switzerland	4
Vietnam	4
Chile	3
Croatia	3
Iraq	3
Morocco	3
Puerto Rico	3
Uruguay	3
Bahamas	2
Bangladesh	2
Barbados	2
Belize	2
Bolivia	2
China	2
European Union	2
Guatemala	2
Kenya	2
Libya	2
Poland	2
Singapore	2
Tanzania	2
Venezuela	2
Bahrain	1
Costa Rica	1
Dominica	1
El Salvador	1
Guadeloupe	1
Guyana	1
Jamaica	1
Malta	1
Mauritania	1
Panama	1
Papua New Guinea	1
Serbia	1
Sri Lanka	1
St. Lucia	1
Sudan	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1
Tunisia	1
Ukraine	1

This month was a clean sweep. No countries that sent me a single reader in August were single-reader countries in July, and vice-versa. Haven’t had that happen in ages.

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WordPress figures I posted 26,178 words in August, for 844.5 words per posting. WordPress has no idea how many of these words are reprinted from earlier, including in this blog. I won’t tell it if you don’t. It brings me to a total of 175,025 words for the year, as of the start of September, and an average 720 words per posting, which is exhausting and I’m glad the number is now complete bunk.

Between the final episode of The Facts Of Life and the start of September I’ve posted 3,134 things to this blog. They attracted 251,025 views from 144,101 unique visitors. And, what the heck, a total of 4,703 comments too.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, please do. The easiest way to be sure you don’t miss anything is to use the panel in the upper right corner of the page to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile via e-mail. This will send every post the moment it’s published, and before its typos are corrected, to your inbox, where you can mark it as read and intend to get back to it sometime.

Or, if you have a WordPress account, you can add the blog to your Reader page, using the sticker that’s just above the e-mail box, and just below the search bar. Or you can add a feed of my essays to your RSS reader. If you need an RSS reader there are options. This Old Reader is one of them, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. I’m not very funny there, but then, I hear you making the inevitable joke for the other half of that sentence. In any case, thank you for reading.

Statistics July: What Comic Strips People Like Me Complaining About

It’s as good a time as any to look at the past month’s readership figures. It’s early in the month, by my standards, but what the heck.

In June the number of page views around here rose a bit from June’s relative low. This to 4,406 page views, which is below the twelve-month running mean of 5,546.0 for the year leading up to June. That’s an era that includes April 2021, when a picture of mine got cited on a Reddit thread, distorting my averages, though. When I compare it to the median, though, a figure much less likely to be distorted by extreme events? That’s also below the twelve-month running median, which was 4,996 page views in a month.

You know, technical traders say I’m right at the natural floor so this is a great time to buy shares in Another Blog, Meanwhile. They expect a swing up to about 7500 views per month by the end of the year.

The number of unique visitors dropped to 2,362 in July. That’s below the running mean of 3,372.9, and below the running median of 3,036.5. I don’t know why so many people decided I wasn’t worth paying attention to this past month. I’m all right. I have more popular story strip plot recaps coming up this August. (And I suspect some of it is the lack of people coming here from my mathematics blog, which was all-but-silent in July.)

Unusually active, though? Likes. There were 165 likes given to any post here in July, above the running mean of 129.3 and running median of 129. And wildly active were comments. WordPress tells me there were 130 comments here in July, triple the twelve-month running mean of 43.1 and the median of 40.5. I haven’t had that talkative a month since January 2018; it’s been the sort of time that makes people wonder if Garrison and I can’t just text each other. We cannot. My phone is such an old-fashioned device that I include salutations and a signature with each text. I can’t communicate with people in any real fashion on it.

The most popular things posted in July were, for a wonder, not all comic strips news. Oh, an essay about why Funky Winkerbean angered everybody who reads Funky Winkerbean, sure. And some news about Vintage Mark Trail and Vintage Prince Valiant. But, like, one was just a bit of actual dialogue committed to text. Another was something that sounds like a clickbait title, so I’m glad people seem amused by it. Here’s the five most popular pieces from July:

• Why is everybody angry with Funky Winkerbean *now*?
• Statistics Saturday: What Your Most Common Misspelling Of “Parmesan” Says About You
• MiSTed: Reboot: Breaking the Barriers (Part 1 of 16)
• Comics Kingdom has vintage Mark Trail now and Prince Valiant for the past 18 months already
• In Which My Love Is Disappointed in Me

I am startled that there’s no What’s Going On In … piece in the top five. I don’t know when’s the last time one of my usual story comic recaps wasn’t among my most popular pieces. (A June 2021 update on Judge Parker was popular, but that’s not a July piece.) The most popular regular story-comic update posted in July was the Gasoline Alley recap. That story with aliens and old-time-radio.

But to speak of the story comics summaries. I’m still doing story comics summaries. My plan for the next month is to take these comics in this order:

• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (10th of August)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (17th of August)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (24th of August)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (31st of August)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (7th of September)
• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (14th of September)

I’m pushing The Amazing Spider-Man a week “late” because, I think, this will let my summary come after the end of the current storyline. And that will be the final Spider-Man update, as this gets the strip back into stories I’ve already summarized. Yes, I’d probably do a better job recapping them, but you know what’s easier than a better job? Not working. I figure to just run a big blank space once every twelve weeks and feel happy about it. That will change if Spider-Man goes back into production, or starts running stories I haven’t already recapped.

Also the Gil Thorp recap will be an exciting challenge. I have not got the faintest recollection of anything that’s happened since the library governance story ended.

---

93 countries sent me any views at all. 22 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

I struggle to come up with a good alt text for this every month. It feels like anyone not seeing the image isn’t really missing anything.

Country	Readers
United States	3,003
India	282
Canada	176
Greece	82
United Kingdom	82
Australia	71
Philippines	64
Brazil	56
Germany	53
Finland	46
Oman	33
South Africa	30
Spain	30
Italy	24
Ireland	19
Ecuador	18
Sweden	18
France	17
Netherlands	17
Russia	16
Mexico	13
Norway	11
Japan	10
Malaysia	9
Pakistan	9
Romania	9
Colombia	8
Hong Kong SAR China	8
New Zealand	8
Nigeria	8
Thailand	8
El Salvador	7
Argentina	6
Bahrain	6
Bangladesh	6
Chile	6
Czech Republic	6
Iraq	6
South Korea	6
China	5
Denmark	5
Israel	5
Portugal	5
Singapore	5
Taiwan	5
Bulgaria	4
Croatia	4
European Union	4
Indonesia	4
Mauritius	4
Belgium	3
Hungary	3
Puerto Rico	3
Turkey	3
Vietnam	3
Algeria	2
Jamaica	2
Jordan	2
Kenya	2
Lebanon	2
Libya	2
Montenegro	2
Nepal	2
Poland	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Serbia	2
Sudan	2
Switzerland	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Ukraine	2
United Arab Emirates	2
Austria	1
Barbados	1
Belarus	1 (*)
Dominican Republic	1 (***)
Egypt	1
Estonia	1 (*)
Guam	1
Iceland	1
Isle of Man	1
Kuwait	1 (*)
Kyrgyzstan	1
Latvia	1
Lithuania	1
Luxembourg	1
Madagascar	1
Morocco	1
Paraguay	1
Peru	1
Slovakia	1 (*)
Sri Lanka	1
St. Vincent & Grenadines	1 (*)
Zimbabwe	1 (*)

Belarus, Estonia, Kuwait, Slovakia, St Vincent & Grenadines, and Zimbabwe were all single-view countries in June also. Dominican Republic has been one view a month for four months now. I hope they really like whatever it is they choose to read.

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WordPress figures I posted 25,348 words in July, for an average of 817.7 words per post. This is why I feel like I don’t have any time anymore. (It’s distorted by all those MiSTings, which are enormous but are also mostly written ages ago, and half of those by someone else.) July brings my words-per-posting for the year up to 702, the longest it’s been. I need to short some of these Popeye cartoons to make up the balance.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, thank you! You can get all these essays by their RSS feed, and never appear in my statistics. If you need an RSS reader, I can get you hooked up. This Old Reader is an option, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

If you’d like to get new posts before I can correct their typos, you can sign up for e-mail delivery. (It’s impossible to get all the typos corrected.) Or if you have a WordPress account, you can use “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” to add this page to your Reader. And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. Thanks for reading, however you find most comfortable.

Statistics June: How In June 2021 Everyone Figured They Had Maybe A Bit Too Much Of Me

I know I can’t stay popular forever and it’s amazing I can be kind-of popular at all. The last couple months my readership’s buoyed by comic strip drama. There’s been none of that for a while.

According to WordPress there were 4,154 page views around here in June. That’s the lowest figure since June of 2020. It’s way below the twelve-month running mean of 5,530.2 page views per month. It’s also well below the twelve-month running median of 4,996 page views. WordPress also says the number of unique visitors dropped, too. There were 2,527 unique visitors recorded, the lowest count since August 2020. My twelve-month running mean was 3,357.0 unique visitors per month, and a running median of 3,036.5.

Still it is neat to have had twelve months’ worth of more than four thousand page views a month. I can’t credit all of that to clicking “refresh” 3800 times a month.

If there’s any consolation, the people who remained interacted some more. There were 134 things liked in June. That’s a bit above the running mean of 125.2 and the median of 128. And the number of comments was up, as well. There were 54 comments given, compared to a twelve-month running mean of 41.3 and median of 39.

Here’s what the most popular posts were in June:

• A question created when I was looking up _The Odd Couple_
• Statistics May: How In May 2021 Everyone Figured They Had The Right Amount Of Me
• What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Why is Gil Thorp sometimes in color now? March – May 2021
• What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Are the other Guardians of the Galaxy in this story? March – June 2021
• Conan Abstract Project Episode 1510 – 24 June 2021

And not to brag but I’ve had a delightful bunch of dumb Statistics Saturday posts recently. The most popular of those this past month was a tie between:

• Statistics Saturday: Some Song Sequels
• Statistics Saturday: Some Forecast Weather

So that’s the sort of month it was around here.

There’s no sense guessing what kind of month July will be. But I have reason for hope. The comic strip plot recaps I have planned are some reliable popular ones:

• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (6th of July)
• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (13th of July)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (20th of July)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (27th of July)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (3rd of August)

That’s all a plan, though. It’s subject to change if news develops. All the story strip recaps are at this link, though.

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I feel like I have fewer page views from Paraguay than I should expect. But it turns out that I’ve had nineteen whole page views from Paraguay in the past ten years alone. So that’s nice to know.

There were 86 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in June. 24 of them got a single view each. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	2,907
India	200
Canada	194
United Kingdom	86
Philippines	79
Germany	73
Australia	69
Brazil	68
South Africa	28
Switzerland	25
Japan	22
Romania	22
Mexico	21
Italy	18
Ireland	17
Spain	17
France	16
Malaysia	15
Ecuador	13
Greece	13
Singapore	13
Sweden	13
Finland	12
Indonesia	10
Netherlands	10
South Korea	10
Trinidad & Tobago	9
Vietnam	9
New Zealand	8
Norway	8
Argentina	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Peru	7
Taiwan	7
Chile	6
Denmark	6
Poland	6
United Arab Emirates	6
Colombia	5
Papua New Guinea	5
Turkey	5
Russia	4
Sri Lanka	4
Croatia	3
Czech Republic	3
Egypt	3
El Salvador	3
European Union	3
Hungary	3
Israel	3
Macedonia	3
Malta	3
Nigeria	3
Serbia	3
Venezuela	3
Austria	2
Bolivia	2
Bulgaria	2
Cyprus	2
Jamaica	2
Moldova	2
Uzbekistan	2
American Samoa	1
Armenia	1
Belarus	1
Belgium	1
Cambodia	1
Dominican Republic	1 (**)
Estonia	1
Fiji	1
French Guiana	1
Georgia	1
Iraq	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1
Maldives	1 (*)
Nicaragua	1
Pakistan	1
Panama	1
Senegal	1
Slovakia	1
St. Vincent & Grenadines	1
Thailand	1
Ukraine	1
Uruguay	1
Zimbabwe	1

Maldives was a single-view country in May. Dominican Republic has been a single-view country two months running. There’s no countries that have gone four months in a row with one view each.

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WordPress estimates that I published 21,504 words here in June, which is well down from May. It’s closer to the year’s average. This was 716.8 words per posting in June. It brings me to a total 123,499 words published for the whole year. And so my average words per post this year has grown to 682. I need some more Popeye reviews where I say nothing except how this was a Popeye cartoon after all.

Between the film version of The Music Man (1962) and the start of July WordPress records 241,944 page views here, from 139,076 unique visitors. I don’t know what I’ll do for my 250,000th page view, but that’s not something I’ll have to deal with for a couple months anyway.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, I don’t know how this article convinced you. But it’s a happy thought. All my posts are available on an RSS feed. And you won’t appear in my statistics in any way if you read that way. There are several ways to read RSS. This Old Reader is an option, for example, as is NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds to your Reading or Friends page.

If you’d like to get new posts without typos corrected, you can sign up for e-mail delivery. Or if you have a WordPress account, you can use “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” to add this page to your Reader. Whatever works for you works for me. Thank you.

Statistics May: How In May 2021 Everyone Figured They Had The Right Amount Of Me

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.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of blogger I’d be if I hadn’t discovered people want to read me explaining Gil Thorp to them. It’s too horrible a fate to consider.

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.

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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.

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Also sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I hadn’t pre-written the alt text, to describe what this monthly readership map looks like, so I can copy and paste that to each month for which it applies. And what will happen if I ever have a month where it doesn’t apply, like because I get way more page views from Ecuador than from the United States.

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.

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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.

Statistics April: how Mark Trail once again gets people to sort of notice me

I do not keep obsessive, day-to-day track of my readership figures. I’m too prone to obsession for it to be good to track things that flutter so. But the panel used to post things has a little readership graph.

So I noticed a spike of views, and viewers, the 12th of April. And a bigger one the next day. Most of that spike evaporated by the 14th. But the readership was still appreciably larger than average for a week or so. And it wasn’t the spike from my post about what color tablet produces which Easter egg color. There was a spike from that, yes, but in the days leading up to Easter, like you’d expect. So what explains this 51st-anniversary-of-Apollo-13 spike?

By the way, if you should have the chance to visit Lakeside Park in Denver, I highly recommend it. It’s got great piles of gorgeous 1930s-era amusement park architecture, a fantastic wooden roller coaster we didn’t get to ride enough, and one of the strangest carousels you could hope to ride. Also a fantastic and strongly democratic philosophy about ride pricing.

Yeah, it’s Reddit’s fault. A thread on the Hobby Drama Reddit described how James Allen left Mark Trail and how Jules Rivera joined it. The thread linked to one of the strips I’ve used in a What’s Going On In … post. And a lot of people clicked on that. So WordPress credited me with a lot more views, and viewers, than I’d otherwise expect. This was my most popular month by far, but, must be said, there’s an asterisk attached. I can’t fault anyone for linking to a picture I copied for fair use from Comics Kingdom. It reassures me in my judgement that these are important, representative strips I’m selecting. But I would like it if sometimes writers linked to my blog, or at least the tag, directly. It’d be nice to pick up a regular reader or two from these flash floods sometime.

Granting there is an asterisk, though, this gives me quite happy-looking readership figures. WordPress credits me with 9,423 views in April. This doesn’t quite double the twelve-month running mean of 5,160.6 views, nor does it quite double the twelve-month median of 4,930 views. It’s close to doubling, though, so I look forward to this messing up my mean and median comparison for a year to come. I’m also credited with 6,594 unique visitors, and that is more than double the twelve-month running mean of 3,047.7 visitors. And the twelve-month median of 2,937 visitors.

Bar chart of monthly readership for two and a half years. After several months that were higher than average April 2021 was extremely high, nearly double the average month from the past year.

In the figures that show some engagement? That’s all much more average. There were 140 things liked in April, which is pretty good lately; the twelve-month mean was 108.3 and the twelve-month median 108.5 likes per month. Nothing like the flush days of 2015, though, when there wasn’t a month below 279 likes. And there were 40 comments. This is exactly the median of the previous twelve months. The running mean was 42.0, so, I probably had a typical enough month with a heap of Reddit splashed on top.

So. I like looking at what posts were popular. The six most popular things this past month which were posted in March or April were:

• The comic strip Buckles is ending in like eight minutes
• How to tell which tablet gives you which Easter egg color
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (weekdays)? Who is this John X? January – April 2021
• The guy who draws Beetle Bailey has seen a squirrel
• MiSTed: Brad Guth’s _Venus for Dummies_, Part 1 of 3
• Statistics Saturday: 15 Famous Movie Mis-Quotes

I went to six, rather than give, just because I’m so stupidly fond of that Movie Mis-Quotes one. It might be my dumbest post ever and I don’t care. It’s glorious.

Of course, the things most sought-after are my comics posts. My plan for the coming month is to explain what’s going on in:

• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (4th of May)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (11th of May)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (18th of May)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (25th of May)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (1st of June)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (8th of June)

That’s just the plan, of course, and it’s subject to change if circumstances call for it.

Wow, strange that it looks like nearly all those Reddit readers interested in Mark Trail drama were from the United States. How could that happen?

There were 93 countries, or things like countries, sending me readers in April. 27 of them were a single view each. Here’s the roster.

Country	Readers
United States	6,785
Canada	444
Australia	408
United Kingdom	286
India	251
Germany	200
Philippines	83
France	79
Brazil	67
Italy	50
Sweden	49
Finland	46
Spain	42
South Africa	36
Norway	34
Singapore	33
Ireland	32
Portugal	31
Malaysia	27
Japan	26
European Union	23
Romania	21
Sri Lanka	21
Netherlands	20
Switzerland	20
Mexico	19
New Zealand	19
Indonesia	18
Thailand	15
Denmark	14
Puerto Rico	14
Chile	13
Belgium	12
South Korea	12
Greece	11
Poland	11
Pakistan	9
Turkey	8
Austria	7
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Russia	7
Argentina	6
Lebanon	6
Peru	6
United Arab Emirates	6
Bosnia & Herzegovina	5
Colombia	5
Hungary	5
Israel	5
Ecuador	4
China	3
Czech Republic	3
Kenya	3
Serbia	3
Trinidad & Tobago	3
Vietnam	3
Bahamas	2
Brunei	2
Costa Rica	2
Croatia	2
Egypt	2
Estonia	2
Jordan	2
Mauritius	2
Slovakia	2
Ukraine	2
Algeria	1
Bangladesh	1
Cambodia	1
Cayman Islands	1
Cook Islands	1
Cuba	1
Dominican Republic	1
El Salvador	1
Fiji	1
Georgia	1
Ghana	1
Isle of Man	1
Jamaica	1
Jersey	1
Kuwait	1
Latvia	1
Lithuania	1 (*)
Macedonia	1
Malta	1 (*)
Panama	1
Qatar	1
Sint Maarten	1
Slovenia	1 (*)
Taiwan	1
Tunisia	1 (*)
U.S. Virgin Islands	1
Venezuela	1 (*)

Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, Tunisia, and Venezuela were single-view countries in March also. Nowhere’s been a single-view country three months in a row.

---

WordPress figures I posted 16,856 words in April, setting a new low for the year. This was an average of 561.9 words per posting in April. It gets me to 75,911 words so far in the year, an average of 633 words for each of 120 posts.

Between Margaret E Knight’s design of a machine to create flat-bottomed paper bags (1871) and the start of May 2021 (1st of May, 2021) I’ve posted 3,011 things here. These have drawn 232,879 views from 133,569 unique visitors.

I’d be glad to have you as a regular reader. This link is the RSS feed for my posts. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one with a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Add any RSS feed to your reading page through either https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or through https://www.livejournal.com/syn. If you’re on WordPress, you should be able to use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add it to your Reader page. And if you want, the link underneath “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” should let you sign up for e-mail delivery. I’m terrified of that one, since that sends out posts before I realize the three typos left in the article however much I proofread. But if that’s what you’re interested in, that’s what you’re interested in. Also every time I re-read an old post there’s more typos. No one has ever been able to explain this phenomenon.

Statistics March: How March 2021 Treated My Humor Blog

These reviews of my readership are always popular, somehow. And they don’t take serious work to write. Why, then, does it take me later and later in the month to actually post them? To the point that by next year I’m going to to slip a whole month behind? That’s a good question and it gets right to the heart of the matter, which is, I don’t know.

March was a busy month here. I can account for some of it. With Easter approaching people wanted help telling which was the pink Paas tablet. And one comic strip got cancelled and another got pulled from dozens of newspapers. That always brings some interest. That doesn’t seem like enough, though. There were 6,078 page views here in March, which is the third-highest readership I have on record. In comparison, in the twelve months leading up to March, the mean number of views was 4,984.3. The median was a relatively paltry 4,628.5.

Upgrade for even more stats, you say? Hmmm. I do like more. This is a strong appeal.

The number of unique viewers also came in high. WordPress tells me there were 3,593 of them in March. The twelve-month running mean was only 2,947.0, and the median 2,701.5. It was even a chatty month. There were 128 likes given, compared to a mean of 103.9 and median of 102.5 for the twelve months prior. And an enormous 76 comments given, compared to a mean of 38.2 and median of 38.5. That’s the greatest number of comments I’ve had since November 2018, and as ever, I have no idea how that happened.

The most popular March-posted things this past month were what you’d expect: a lot of comic strip talk. Here’s the top five.

• The comic strip Buckles is ending in like eight minutes which was by far the most popular post here in March. Second-most-popular was a piece from last year, There’s nothing particular going on with the comic strip _Buckles_, which was true when I wrote it. I forgot about that post, though, which is a shame since if I had edited it sooner I might have left some people less confused.
• Why did Mallard Fillmore stop running in the newspaper?
• In Which I’m Upset About Comic Strips, Yes, Again
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter XIX
• Statistics February: People Are Acclimated To The New Mark Trail

My most popular Statistics Saturday piece from March was Papal Regnal Numbers Over Time, 1900 – Present. I’m glad this is a popular chart because it graphs something that needs no graph and then makes a very silly interpolation.

I haven’t decided what to post for long-form pieces once Venus For Dummies is exhausted. I’m inclined toward another MiSTing, though. I do plan to continue the comic strip plot summaries. What I expect to do in the weeks ahead is:

• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (13th of April)
• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (20th of April)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (27th of April)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (4th of May)

Gasoline Alley by the way seems to have finally started its centennial of Skeezix. I don’t know why it started this months behind the actual day. Maybe it matched some important date besides Skeezix’s first appearance.

---

There were 89 countries or country-like entities sending me readers in March. Which ones? Here’s the always well-liked roster:

Country	Readers
United States	4,693
Canada	205
United Kingdom	132
Germany	131
India	129
Australia	126
Philippines	50
Italy	46
South Africa	40
Finland	39
Brazil	36
Malaysia	33
Spain	29
France	26
Mexico	21
Norway	20
Indonesia	17
Iceland	13
Ireland	13
Japan	13
New Zealand	13
Puerto Rico	12
Hong Kong SAR China	11
Kenya	11
Denmark	10
Netherlands	10
Romania	10
Sweden	10
United Arab Emirates	10
Argentina	8
Hungary	8
Macedonia	8
Israel	7
Singapore	7
South Korea	7
Belgium	5
Colombia	5
Sri Lanka	5
Switzerland	5
Turkey	5
Ecuador	4
Egypt	4
Jamaica	4
Nigeria	4
Russia	4
Austria	3
Bangladesh	3
European Union	3
Greece	3
Mauritius	3
Morocco	3
Namibia	3
Poland	3
Saudi Arabia	3
Taiwan	3
Thailand	3
Trinidad & Tobago	3
Ukraine	3
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Cambodia	2
Cameroon	2
Kuwait	2
Lebanon	2
Montenegro	2
Pakistan	2
Peru	2
Vietnam	2
Åland Islands	1
Bahamas	1
Bahrain	1
Barbados	1
Botswana	1
Bulgaria	1 (*)
China	1
Cyprus	1
Ethiopia	1
Guadeloupe	1
Guam	1 (*)
Guatemala	1
Guyana	1
Lithuania	1
Malta	1
Oman	1
Slovakia	1
Slovenia	1
Somalia	1
Tunisia	1
Uganda	1
Venezuela	1

There were 22 single-view countries. Bulgaria and Guam were the only ones to be single-view countries in February also. No country is on a three-month or longer streak.

---

WordPress figures I posted 18,611 words in March, my fewest for any one month this year. It’s an average of 600.4 words per posting in March, which is what happens when I don’t write up so many Popeye cartoons. I’m at 59,055 words for the whole year, so far, an average of 656 words per posting in 2021.

Between the Broadway debut of The Male Animal (9th of January, 1940, at the Cort) and the start of April 2021 (1st of April, 2021) I’ve posted 2,981 things here, says WordPress. These have drawn 223,457 views from 126,975 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, you’re being kind. You can add my posts to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then add any RSS feed to your reading page through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or through https://www.livejournal.com/syn. If you’re on WordPress already, you should be able to use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add it to your Reader page. And if you want you can have posts sent to you by e-mail, using the link underneath “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile”.

Statistics February: People Are Acclimated To The New Mark Trail

As the month is well underway, it’s fair to look at what the readership around here last month was like. I can see from the most popular posts that people were upset about Mark Trail. But the number of people looking up Mark Trail, or other comic strips, dropped for the fourth month running.

It’s almost at a transition point, too. According to WordPress there were 4,778 page views here in February. That’s just below the twelve-month running mean, from February 2020 through January 2021, of 4,851.3. It is still above the twelve-month running median of 4,385.5. This tells me I’m benefiting from people who want the change in artist explained if not justified. The thing is, February’s also a short month. There were on (arithmetic mean) average 170.6 page views per day in February. The twelve-month running average was 158.9 leading up to February. The twelve-month running mean median 143.9. So I’m coming back to normal, after the Mark Trail boost, but not quite there yet.

Thinking of starting a rumor that Olivia Jaimes is taking over The Far Side just so I can enjoy the sweet popularity of clickbait and outrage.

The story’s similar for the unique views. There were 2,780 unique viewers in February, a mean of 99.3 per day. The twelve-month running mean was 2,879.4 unique viewers per month, but that’s 94.3 per day. The running median was 2,564 unique viewers per month, or 84.1 per day.

On things that are exactly in line with everything? There were 101 likes given my blog in February. The running mean was 101.8. The running median 99.5. Prorated per day, it’s a little less in-line. This was an average 3.6 likes per day, compared to a running mean of 3.3 and running median of 3.2.

And comments! I had comments in February, always to my amazement. In particular there were 38 comments. The running mean was 35.5 and running median 38.5. This is an average 1.4 comments per day, with a running mean of 1.2 and running median of 1.2 for the twelve months leading up to February.

This all suggests I’m losing the Mark Trail outrage readership. The Mallard Fillmore controversy might help me out a bit this month.

I intended to link the five most popular articles from the past two months. This ended up with another tie for fifth place. That’s convenient, though, as it lets me reach to one of my long-form pieces.

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why is The Phantom talking about Emperor Joonkar so much? November 2020 – February 2021
• Distracted by, you know, That Cartoon
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why did Eve freak out at the mannequin? November 2020 – February 2021
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? What happened for Skeezix’s centennial? November 2020 – February 2021
• Not to Name Names
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? How is Mark Trail not in jail? November 2020 – January 2021
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter XIV

I do expect to finish off The Tale of Fatty Raccoon this month. I haven’t decided whether to go back to writing wholly original long-form pieces or what. I might do some more MiSTings. They’ve been pleasant to do, although much of that pleasantness depends on how Arthur Scott Bailey is good source material. I can’t guarantee that another book would be as good. Also I don’t know that I want to go another twenty(?) weeks on some forgotten animal-adventure book. I’m open to hearing opinions, if anyone has them, though.

What I do plan on writing are comic strip plot summaries. My plan for the month ahead is to take this order, provided breaking news or special circumstances don’t get in the way:

• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (9th of March)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (16th of March)
• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (23rd of March)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (30th of March)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (6th of April)

Yeah, The Amazing Spider-Man is never coming out of repeats. I figure to do a couple more recaps, to get back to the story where I started doing plot recaps, and then retire it. I might start recapping Rip Haywire to make up the gap, or shift to an 11-week cycle. Or if there’s another good story strip I’m overlooking, and that could use recapping, let me know. It’s what people like to see me do, and it’s fun doing, so that’s a good match.

---

Not sure which of these are small islands with one or two page views and which ones are my need to clean my screen. Please let me know of any world islands you don’t see.

77 countries sent me readers at all in February. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	3,505
United Kingdom	167
Canada	159
India	150
Philippines	81
Australia	63
Germany	53
Brazil	52
France	44
Spain	36
Finland	29
Italy	28
Peru	22
Mexico	21
Norway	20
South Africa	19
Sweden	19
Latvia	18
Malaysia	18
United Arab Emirates	15
Poland	14
Portugal	12
Denmark	11
Kuwait	11
Austria	10
Indonesia	10
Jamaica	10
Saudi Arabia	10
Netherlands	9
Singapore	9
Belgium	8
Costa Rica	8
Egypt	8
Ireland	7
Japan	7
Serbia	7
Chile	6
Puerto Rico	6
Thailand	6
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Lithuania	5
Nigeria	5
Switzerland	5
Croatia	4
European Union	4
Greece	4
New Zealand	4
Argentina	3
Czech Republic	3
Hungary	3
Turkey	3
Vietnam	3
American Samoa	2
Cayman Islands	2
El Salvador	2
Georgia	2
Iceland	2
Israel	2
Kenya	2
Romania	2
Slovenia	2
South Korea	2
Sri Lanka	2
Taiwan	2
Zimbabwe	2
Bangladesh	1 (*)
Belize	1 (*)
Bhutan	1
Bulgaria	1
Colombia	1
Guam	1
Iraq	1
Jordan	1
Liechtenstein	1
Pakistan	1
Russia	1
St. Martin	1
Trinidad & Tobago	1

Thirteen of these were single-reader countries. Only Bangladesh and Belize have been single-reader countries for two months running. Nowhere has a three-month or longer streak going.

---

WordPress says that I posted 19,578 words in February, which comes to an average 699.2 words per post. To date for 2021, I’m averaging 686 words per post. I need to stop having such verbose discussions of Popeye cartoons. It’s been 40,444 words for the year, up to the start of March.

Between the first publication of the nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb (the 24th of May, 1830) and the first of March, I’ve published 2,950 things to this blog. They drew a total 217,379 views from a recorded 123,380 unique visitors.

I’d like to have you as a regular reader. I don’t know how this would convince you. But you can add my posts to your RSS reader. If you lack an RSS reader, you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then add any RSS feed to your reading page through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or through https://www.livejournal.com/syn. If you’re on WordPress already, you should be able to use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button to add it to your Reader page.

Thank you all for reading, including those of you that are bots seeking blogs to which you can post “Great topic with lots of valuable information to think about thanx! amazorn-11824500683037495538aqprd.zabooty.narf”. Those are the ones that make it all worthwhile.

Statistics January: People don’t hate Mark Trail as much as they used to

I enjoy reviewing a month’s readership figures, normally at the month’s end. So this is a good chance to look over January’s postings. It was another month in which my readership declined, a steady process since October, when Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail debuted.

Still. There were 5,082 pages viewed here in January 2021. That’s a good bit above the twelve-month running mean of 4,686.8 views per month, and above the running median of 4,286.5. These came from 3,094 unique visitors, also above the running mean of 2,767.4 visitors and running median of 2,479.5. All I need to stay popular is for story comics to go on looking weird. So I’m rooting for the Macanudo cartoonist take over Spider-Man.

There were 143 things liked in January, beating the running mean of 100.4 and running median of 99.5 likes per month. And there were even 48 comments — I’m surprised by that number too — well above the mean of 32.7 and median of 36.5 comments per month. It’s my chattiest month since, well, November, although some of that is comments I didn’t reply to before Sunday night. That’ll go in to boosting February’s numbers, though.

I can only imagine how popular I’d be if I did plot recaps for the stories in Vintage Barney Google over on ComicsKingdom. … But I have a strong suspicion.

My most popular posts were all about why various comic strips (Mark Trail, Mallard Fillmore, Heart of the City) look different. They got new artists. Well, Mallard Fillmore, the old artist came back, I’m told; I’m not reading it. The most popular posts published in either December or January were:

• How December 2020 Treated My Humor Blog
• I don’t know who this Sarah Rose writing Barney Google this week is either
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Who is Towns Ellerbee? October 2020 – January 2021
• How do you suppose the packing is going?
• Statistics 2020: How Last Year Treated My Humor Blog

And yeah, those all turn out to be January posts; nothing from December had much of a January life. My most popular Statistics Saturday post was Things From 1925 Now In The Public Domain. This shows again the value of posting something a little clickbait-y. The most popular of the long-form pieces, which have all been Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction lately, was MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Chapter X.

I plan to keep on MiSTing The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, one chapter per week, so I’ve got something that I should be doing tonight. Statistics Saturday will keep on going you-know-when too. And for the story strip recaps, my plan is to take these strips in this order:

• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (9 February)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (16 February)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (23 February)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (2 March)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (9 March)

That’s all subject to revision. There may also be extra stuff to write about Gasoline Alley come the middle of February.

I’m experimenting with using the same alt-text for this map of countries that sent me readers every month. How is it working? … rather well. Sometimes I have to go and double-check there was any change month-to-month.

82 countries or things as good as countries sent me readers in January. Here they are, and how many:

Country	Readers
United States	3,573
United Kingdom	188
Canada	187
India	180
Germany	93
Philippines	72
Australia	62
Italy	61
Indonesia	45
Portugal	40
South Africa	37
Spain	36
Sweden	36
Finland	33
Brazil	30
Denmark	30
Ireland	22
Netherlands	22
Mexico	21
United Arab Emirates	21
Sri Lanka	18
France	16
Thailand	16
Norway	15
Singapore	14
El Salvador	13
European Union	13
Malaysia	13
Japan	11
Latvia	11
Romania	11
Belgium	8
Argentina	7
Turkey	7
New Zealand	6
Austria	5
Mongolia	5
Peru	5
Russia	5
South Korea	5
Chile	4
Colombia	4
Greece	4
Israel	4
Nigeria	4
Switzerland	4
Trinidad & Tobago	4
China	3
Czech Republic	3
Serbia	3
Ukraine	3
Barbados	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Ecuador	2
Egypt	2
Hong Kong SAR China	2
Hungary	2
Iceland	2
Jamaica	2
Maldives	2
Pakistan	2
Panama	2
Poland	2
Puerto Rico	2
Qatar	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Taiwan	2
Venezuela	2
Vietnam	2
Bahrain	1 (***)
Bangladesh	1
Belize	1
Croatia	1
Kenya	1
Lebanon	1
Liberia	1
Macedonia	1
Oman	1
Palestinian Territories	1
Senegal	1
Slovenia	1 (*)
Tanzania	1

13 of them were single-view countries, way down from December’s 23. Slovenia was a single-view country two months in a row. Bahrain’s on four months in a row. Nobody else has a streak going.

Between the debut of that awful 1990s Land of the Lost TV show and the start of February 2021, I’ve posted 2,922 things here. They gathered in all 212,601 views from a logged 120,599 unique visitors. WordPress things I published 20,866 words over the month, for an average of 673.1 words per post. Watch this post mess that all up.

If you’d like to be a regular reader, I don’t know how this post convinced you. But you can add my essays feed here to your RSS reader. If you need an RSS reader, sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can then add my, or any, RSS feed through https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn. And if you’re on WordPress you should be able to click “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” and have it in the Reader you mean to look at more than you do.

Thanks for reading, or at least letting the page load so it looks to me like a page view. Take care, please.

Statistics Saturday: How 2021 Treated My Humor Blog

I thought I might get ahead of schedule for once in my life and so check what my 2021 readership figures might look like. So here’s where we go based on the start of the month:

I bet things looked totally different two minuts after midnight New Year’s Day, when dozens of people stopped in to see what the deal was with Mark Trail.

Zero page views, zero visitors … Maybe I checked too early.

Statistics 2020: How Last Year Treated My Humor Blog

I do like starting the month, and the year, with a look at the past month’s, and year’s, readership statistics. Someday I’ll learn something from all this, but until then, it’s a good way to fill a publication slot with something that’s oddly well-liked.

2020 was my eighth year of this blog; I’ll reach the actual anniversary later this month. It was also the best-read year I’ve ever had around here. There were 56,241 page views recorded from 33,209 unique visitors. Both are about one-third higher than 2019’s figures, of 42,746 views from 24,539 visitors. The number of likes resumed its drop, falling to 1,205 from the previous year’s 1,714. My likes around here peaked in 2015 and have dropped every year except 2018 since. Comments rose a bit, with 392 received in 2020, compared to 277 in 2019. My comments also peaked in 2015, with 879 of them, although 2018 almost overtook that earlier year with 830 comments.

So I had a big readership spike in 2015 when Apartment 3-G went all to pieces. Then another one in 2020 when Mark Trail tried to somehow be more dramatic than the whole world. Clearly what I need is to somehow cause a bitter controversy to break out over, I don’t know, Gil Thorp and then sell my blog to Hollywood.

That’s what the readership looks like, in pictures and a handful of numbers. But what are people looking to read? Mostly, they want to read about Mark Trail. Also, to an extent, other comic strips. The ten most-read things I posted in 2020 were these; see if you spot any common themes:

• Why does Mark Trail look funny? Did something happen to James Allen?
• Why does Mallard Fillmore look different now? What happened to Bruce Tinsley?
• Why does Mark Trail look different? Did James Allen leave Mark Trail?
• Norm Feuti’s _Retail_ comic strip is ending
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Do you hate the new Mark Trail? August – November 2020
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Did Mark Trail leave Harvey Camel for dead? December 2019 – March 2020
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Is Mark Trail ever coming back? June – August 2020
• Why does Heart Of The City look weird now? Who’s drawing Heart Of The City?
• Jules Rivera takes over Mark Trail in October
• Why does Pluggers look different? Did Gary Brookins stop drawing Pluggers?

It’s a bit sobering to realize that what people most want from me is that I read the Daily Cartoonist and mention stuff from it later on. If that’s what people want and actual comic strip news sites don’t block my IP, fine. I’ll do that.

The most popular long-form essay I posted in 2020 was What Your Favorite Polygon Says About You, which pleases me. That’s a nice silly piece just true enough to catch.

There was a tie for my most popular Statistics Saturday post. Statistics Saturday: Where Comic Strips Are Set, which offers real information, got as many views as Hypotheses about How the Premise to _Loonatics Unleashed_ Came About, which mocks a harmless cartoon for no good reason. I’d still like to know how such a weird thing came about, though.

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There were 151 countries or country-like things, such as the United Kingdom, to send me readers at all in 2020. Here’s who they were:

Country	Readers
United States	42,247
India	2,335
Canada	1,679
United Kingdom	1,510
Australia	895
Philippines	693
Brazil	525
Germany	498
Italy	445
Sweden	423
Finland	294
South Africa	283
France	275
Spain	267
Norway	205
Macedonia	164
Netherlands	157
Mexico	156
European Union	138
Colombia	120
Portugal	111
Ireland	105
Indonesia	104
Japan	104
Malaysia	104
Denmark	94
New Zealand	88
Belgium	81
Kenya	78
Russia	76
South Korea	76
Singapore	71
Thailand	71
Chile	70
Hong Kong SAR China	67
Poland	67
Switzerland	66
Peru	63
Trinidad & Tobago	63
Romania	62
Taiwan	60
Argentina	57
El Salvador	56
China	50
United Arab Emirates	47
Pakistan	44
Nigeria	43
Austria	42
Turkey	41
Serbia	37
Greece	36
Jamaica	33
Vietnam	33
Sri Lanka	32
Bosnia & Herzegovina	28
Hungary	28
Czech Republic	25
Israel	24
Saudi Arabia	22
Bulgaria	21
Croatia	21
Kuwait	21
Papua New Guinea	21
Egypt	20
Ukraine	19
Morocco	18
Bangladesh	17
Ecuador	17
Nepal	17
Slovakia	17
Slovenia	17
Puerto Rico	16
Zambia	15
Costa Rica	14
Venezuela	14
Cyprus	12
Guadeloupe	12
Lebanon	12
Iceland	11
Oman	11
Tanzania	11
Uruguay	11
Estonia	10
Guatemala	10
Honduras	10
American Samoa	9
Qatar	8
Dominican Republic	7
Myanmar (Burma)	7
Kazakhstan	6
Panama	6
Bahrain	5
Barbados	5
Belarus	5
Guyana	5
Mauritius	5
Moldova	5
Paraguay	5
Bermuda	4
Bolivia	4
Brunei	4
Cook Islands	4
Fiji	4
Jordan	4
Latvia	4
Montenegro	4
Belize	3
Ethiopia	3
Laos	3
Tunisia	3
Uzbekistan	3
Zimbabwe	3
Albania	2
Algeria	2
Azerbaijan	2
Bhutan	2
Botswana	2
Cambodia	2
Libya	2
Malta	2
Senegal	2
St. Lucia	2
Uganda	2
Åland Islands	1
Aruba	1
Bahamas	1
British Virgin Islands	1
Burkina Faso	1
Caribbean Netherlands	1
Cayman Islands	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Curaçao	1
Georgia	1
Ghana	1
Guam	1
Iraq	1
Isle of Man	1
Jersey	1
Kosovo	1
Liechtenstein	1
Lithuania	1
Madagascar	1
Maldives	1
Mali	1
Mauritania	1
Mongolia	1
Nicaragua	1
Rwanda	1
Somalia	1
Suriname	1
Turks & Caicos Islands	1

I actually just reused the alt text from my December-2020-recap post. How right was it?

Nobody from Greenland, but that’s all right. I had two page views from Greenland on my mathematics blog so I’ll be riding on that high for a while.

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Over 2020, I published 204,435 words here, says WordPress. Spread over 366 essays that’s an average of 559 words per posting. Both of these are down a little from 2019’s totals,

What do I plan doing for 2021? Plot recaps for the story comics, obviously. I could probably shut down everything else on this blog and be as well-read. But I hope to keep publishing some long-form piece every Thursday night, Eastern Time. And some Statistics Saturday post, where I puff a quick joke up into a pie chart every week. And besides that? I don’t know; I guess I’m committed to finishing watching all these King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons from the 60s. That’s something.

I’m glad to have you reading along. You can get all my posts by using this feed in your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one (among other ways) by signing up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then you can add any RSS feed to your reading page, through this link for Dreamwidth and through this link for Livejournal. Or you could click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” link on this page, and have it in your WordPress reader.

Thanks for being wherever it is you’ve ended up.

How December 2020 Treated My Humor Blog

December 2020 was the second month that I’ve been in low-power-mode here. That’s been marked by using old Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction for the weekly long-form pieces, and lots and lots of Popeye cartoon reviews for daily stuff. It was a bit more actually active than in November. I suppose in the next months I’ll have more non-review writing here, as I feel able to do. But, again, writing about Popeye cartoons is comfortable and easy and I understand I’ve needed more comfortable and easy.

Ah, but how did this affect my desire to be popular? And that’s what I try to do a review of monthly readership figures for.

All my readership statistics, as WordPress logs them, fell in December. There were 5,759 page views recorded, from 3,381 unique visitors. The twelve-month running mean, for December 2019 through November 2020, was 4,462.2 page views in a month. The twelve-month median was 4,228 page views. So I do feel good about coming in above average. The twelve-month running mean was 2,632.3 unique visitors per month. The median was 2,450.5 unique visitors. So again that’s comfortably above the average.

I like that I’ve somehow recreated the Philadephia skyline, though, so I accomplished that this month at least.

There were 128 things liked in December. That beats the twelve-month running averages — 98.4 likes as a mean; 99.5 likes as a median. It’s still well below, like, the average for 2019, or 2018. I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s WordPress.com that’s in such a decline. Or whether buying my own domain name would help, however much WordPress advertises the service. The most dire single number was comments: there were only 18 in December. The twelve-month mean was 32.9, and the median 36.5. I may be asking too much of people to ask them to have an opinion about a 1960s Popeye cartoon.

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What did people want to read here in December? Anything about Mark Trail. I only do so much of that. Most of it was older comic strip posts, though. The five most popular essays posted here in November or December ended in a three-way tie, naturally enough. But here’s the roster:

• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Do you hate the new Mark Trail? August – November 2020
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Who’s this Emperor Joonkar? September – November 2020
• Statistics November: How Many People Wanted Me To Fix Mark Trail Last Month
• Statistics Saturday: Things You Forgot Happened This Year
• What’s got my plans diverted now
• MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Coon, Chapter VII

I’m surprised The Phantom drew so many views but, all right. I am embarrassed that among the things I forgot to list as happening in 2020: that time in Animal Crossing when suddenly everything was eggs.

Still, what people always really want to read is the story strip recaps. The comic strips I plan to look at the next month include:

• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (12 January)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (19 January)
• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy
  (26 January)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (2 February)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (9 February)

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Bah! Two Baltic states away from having all of NATO this month. I guess I have the former SEATO, but who cares about SEATO? (Yes, yes, I apologize to Leszek Buszynski, but c’mon, his book about SEATO is even subtitled “The Failure of an Alliance Strategy”.)

There were 88 countries or country-like countries sending me any page views in December. 23 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	4,603
India	164
Canada	117
United Kingdom	103
Philippines	92
Sweden	78
Australia	55
Brazil	46
Italy	37
Norway	31
Germany	30
South Africa	25
Portugal	24
Finland	23
Chile	21
Spain	20
France	18
Japan	16
Mexico	16
Netherlands	13
Romania	11
Malaysia	10
Greece	9
Indonesia	9
Poland	9
Denmark	8
European Union	8
Hong Kong SAR China	8
Ireland	8
Serbia	8
Cyprus	7
Czech Republic	7
South Korea	7
Iceland	6
Russia	6
Belgium	5
Puerto Rico	5
Trinidad & Tobago	5
Ukraine	5
Bangladesh	4
Saudi Arabia	4
Singapore	4
Bermuda	3
Hungary	3
Kuwait	3
New Zealand	3
Switzerland	3
American Samoa	2
Austria	2
Azerbaijan	2
Belarus	2
Bosnia & Herzegovina	2
Cambodia	2
China	2
Guyana	2
Kazakhstan	2
Kenya	2
Moldova	2
Morocco	2
Pakistan	2
Peru	2
Tanzania	2
Thailand	2
Turkey	2
Vietnam	2
Bahrain	1 (**)
Barbados	1
Botswana	1
Colombia	1 (*)
Costa Rica	1 (*)
Estonia	1
Guatemala	1
Isle of Man	1
Israel	1 (**)
Jamaica	1
Jersey	1
Jordan	1
Kosovo	1
Madagascar	1
Malta	1
Mauritius	1 (*)
Nigeria	1
Qatar	1 (*)
Rwanda	1
Slovenia	1
Sri Lanka	1
Taiwan	1
Uruguay	1

Colombia, Costa Rica, Mauritius, and Qatar were single-view countries in November. Bahrain and Israel were single-view countries for the third month in a row. Nobody’s on a four-month streak.

Between that time everyone got mad at U2 because they Apple gave everyone their album and the start of January 2021, I posted 2,891 things here. They gathered a total 207,519 views from 117,505 logged unique visitors.

In December 2020 I posted 19,802 words, for an average of 638.8 words per posting in the month. And that’s brought my annual words-per-posting, for 2020, up to 559. Popeye cartoons are easy to write about; they’re hard to write about succinctly.

So, what will I write for tomorrow, as I’ve used up past years’ chapters of The Tale of Fatty Coon? And past that? You can see by checking in here regularly. Or by adding the essays here to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one easily. One way is by signing up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. Then you can add any RSS feed to your reading page, through this link for Dreamwidth and through this link for Livejournal. Or you could just click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” link on this page, and have it in your WordPress reader.

However you do it, though, thank you for reading. See you again soon, I hope.

Statistics November: How Many People Wanted Me To Fix Mark Trail Last Month

November 2020 was an exceptional one for me, as it was for many people. The big one is I went into a low-power mode. This has been a very stressful year. I had great fears for the United States elections. I needed to shift to things I could do when more emotionally fragile. And that’s reprinting a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfiction and reviewing a lot of Popeye cartoons. What did readers think of this?

They didn’t notice, because they wanted to know about Mark Trail. But that’s all right since, by good fortune, I had the plot recap for Mark Trail posted in the middle of the month. I’m sure I can’t stay in low-power mode forever. But for now? This is an easier way to manage my blog, and I’ll keep at that until I’m ready to go back to normal. Probably after the new year.

According to WordPress, there were 6,284 pages viewed in November. This is fewer than in October, but October was the greatest number of page views I’d had in a month. November was the second-greatest. I can’t be too fretful about that. The twelve-month running average leading up to November was 4,282.9 page views per month. So a lot of people are upset about Mark Trail and they’re coming to me to ask about it.

I absolutely dare Google Ad Technologies Inc to come up with a way to make money on me talking about the Popeye cartoons of the 60s.

There were 3,868 unique visitors logged around here in November. Again that’s down from October, but October was my record high. 3,868 is still my second-highest unique visitor count on record. The twelve-month running average is a mere 2,517.7 unique visitors.

The things where people interact with the page in some way were up, also. WordPress recorded 136 likes given to posts in November, above the running average of 94.8. It’s the greatest number of likes I’ve gotten in a month since July of 2019. And there were 48 comments given, way above the 29.9 running average and my greatest number since … well, April, which also saw 48. But no month’s had more than 48 comments since January 2019, when 70 comments came in here. Again, people really want to argue about Mark Trail, or Alley Oop. I’m spoiling the fun by not being too obviously angry about or fannish of either strip.

What was popular around here in November? Everything with “Mark Trail” in the subject line. But to be more exact, the most popular things posted in October or November have been:

• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Do you hate the new Mark Trail? August – November 2020
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Is Jules Rivera destroying Mark Trail yet? July – October 2020
• Statistics Saturday: Hypotheses about How the Premise to _Loonatics Unleashed_ Came About
• Statistics Saturday: Some Trivia Answers, For My Dad
• 60s Popeye: Popeye’s Testimonial Dinner and what the heck was that

I’m delighted that my needless mocking of an unimportant cartoon captured people’s imagination. Also that my Statistics Saturday piece for my Dad was received so well. Dad, if you have other statistics ideas, please, let me know; apparently, they play well. The most popular long-form piece was the first chapter in the MiSTing of The Tale of Fatty Coon. Chapters of that should keep going through the month, at least.

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I of course intend to keep publishing my What’s Going On In series. Coming up are some of the comics that were pretty big draws back in their day, before everybody got mad at Mark Trail and Alley Oop. If pressing news, or pressing life, doesn’t force a change I expect to publish:

• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (8th of December)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (15th of December)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (22nd of December)
• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (29th of December)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (36th of December)

I’m aware that The Amazing Spider-Man is still in repeats and is almost certainly not coming out again. My plan, right now, is to cover the strip until it starts repeating things I’ve already recapped. I’ll change that if I get bored making retread Spider-Gags.

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87 countries sent me readers in November, up rom a couple months of 77 countries each. The roster this month was:

Country	Readers
United States	4,941
India	207
Canada	187
United Kingdom	142
Philippines	107
Australia	72
Germany	41
Sweden	40
France	35
South Africa	33
Spain	31
Brazil	30
Finland	26
Mexico	26
Bosnia & Herzegovina	25
Italy	24
Malaysia	18
Japan	15
Ireland	14
Morocco	13
Peru	13
China	12
Jamaica	12
Netherlands	12
El Salvador	10
Russia	10
Belgium	9
Norway	9
Trinidad & Tobago	9
Indonesia	8
New Zealand	8
Saudi Arabia	8
Thailand	8
Switzerland	6
Denmark	5
Estonia	5
European Union	5
Kenya	5
Poland	5
Romania	5
United Arab Emirates	5
Chile	4
Croatia	4
Lebanon	4
Montenegro	4
Nigeria	4
Oman	4
Taiwan	4
Ukraine	4
Egypt	3
Portugal	3
Singapore	3
Argentina	2
Czech Republic	2
Greece	2
Hungary	2
Kuwait	2
Pakistan	2
Panama	2
Serbia	2
Slovakia	2
Slovenia	2
South Korea	2
Sri Lanka	2
Bahrain	1 (*)
Bangladesh	1 (*)
Bulgaria	1
Cayman Islands	1
Colombia	1
Costa Rica	1
Cyprus	1
Ecuador	1
Ethiopia	1
Guadeloupe	1
Hong Kong SAR China	1
Israel	1 (*)
Latvia	1
Macedonia	1
Mauritius	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Nepal	1
Qatar	1
Senegal	1
Turkey	1
Uzbekistan	1
Venezuela	1
Vietnam	1 (*)

Bahrain, Bangladesh, Israel, and Vietnam were single-view countries in October also. No countries have been single-view for more than two months in a row, just now.

Victoria II map challenge here.

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Between the introduction of the second-generation iPod and the start of December I posted 2,860 pieces here. They gathered 201,752 views from 114,113 logged visitors. Oh, man, think if I’d gotten one more visitor. That would have been so nice.

For all that November was an easy month, it was not a terse one. WordPress records me as writing 25,140 words in November, for an average of 838.0 words per posting. Well, these routine, bulk-quantity Popeye cartoons give me a lot to talk about, all right? It means that for 2020 I’m averaging 551 words per post, a jump of nearly thirty words per post since October. I need to say less stuff about these cartoons, I guess.

Will I? You can find out by adding my essays to your RSS reader. Don’t have an RSS reader? Sign up for a free account with Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed to your reading page there, using this link for Dreamwidth or this link for Livejournal. If you’re on WordPress, too, you can click “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” on this or any post’s page.

Thanks for the reading.

Statistics October: When Am I Going to Do Something About Mark Trail, And What Will That Be?

I have not a thing to do with Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail. Even in the world of comic strip snark bloggers I’m a third-tier player. The nearest connection I have is that a former friend went on to become a syndicated cartoonist.

But I do read it, and I occasionally recap its plot. I do this for a dozen story strips. This is my plan for what comic strips I’ll be recapping the next month, and when I plan to post those recaps:

• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (10 November)
• Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail (17 November)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (24 November)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays)
  (31 November)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (38 November)

So my first comments about the story and my reaction to it, I figure to have in two weeks. Hope you feel it’s worth the wait. Me? I’m just reveling in that I figured out how to post from the Classic, or “Good”, WordPress editor again and don’t have to fight the new Block, or “Bad”, one to do stuff like embed images or videos.

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So, like, every month I hope to look at my readership figures and see what was popular and what wasn’t. This month? It was extremely popular for me, according to WordPress’s count of page views, and other stuff. WordPress tells me there were 7,149 page views here in October. This is the largest I’ve ever had in a single month, going past even the Apocalypse 3-G peak in November 2015. It’s way above the 4,050.8 twelve-month running average of page views. The number of unique visitors was way up too. WordPress recorded 4,135 unique visitors in October, also a record, and way above the twelve-month running average of 2,374.8. Heck, 4,135 views, never mind visitors, would be among my most-read months.

I feel like daring them to tell me how I could get people to pay me for reading Gil Thorp.

I know why all these visitors. You do too. But let’s let that wait a moment and look at other statistics. There were 115 things liked here in October, tolerably above the twelve-month running average of 95.3. And there were a positively robust 43 comments, beating the average 27.5. I do like seeing all this. My next goal will be getting two commenters having a conversation with each other, instead of chatting with me. Well, that’ll probably never happen. I’ve been doing this daily for eight years; if I knew how to say stuff that attracted people who want to talk to each other, I’d have done it by now.

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So what does draw people in? The mode of them were looking for Mark Trail news. The five most-read pieces in October were posts with names like Why does Mark Trail look funny? and Why Does Mark Trail look different? As I noticed these getting popular I put up tags to tell people about the new artist-and-writer, and to point them to my plot-recaps pages. They’ll never come back. The only pieces to compare were, well, that months-in-reverse-alphabetical-order post, and one asking about what’s going on with Mallard Fillmore. Daily Cartoonist says that Bruce Tinsley is returned to the comic strip he originated. That’s all right. I return from not reading Mallard Fillmore to not reading Mallard Fillmore.

The five most popular pieces around here that were posted in September or October of this year were largely comic strip based. One original thing did make the cut:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why did Heloise tell Mrs Daft they called their Aunt ‘Mom’? July – October 2020
• What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Is Jules Rivera destroying Mark Trail yet? July – October 2020
• So I only just today got this Far Side comic
• Shoe almost completely on other foot; Bruce Tinsley returning to Mallard Fillmore
• In Which My Fortune Is All But Made

My most popular long-form essay was Some Astounding Things About The Moon, which it’s nice to see get some recognition. Especially since I both like the piece and had the main bulk of it spill out in about twenty minutes’ thinking, which is a pretty good ratio. Some pieces I spend all week trying to get into shape and they’re still formless blobs. My most popular Statistics Saturday piece was, of course, How Many People Wanted To Know What Was Up With Mark Trail This Past Week. I’m not above being a little clickbait-y, as long as I can whitewash it with irony. Yes, I’m Gen-X.

77 countries sent me any readers at all in October. That’s the same count as in September. There were 15 single-view countries, up from 10 the month before. Here’s the roster:

Country	Readers
United States	5,677
India	262
Philippines	144
Canada	142
United Kingdom	113
Australia	102
Colombia	51
Germany	49
South Africa	43
Sweden	42
France	35
Spain	33
Brazil	29
Norway	28
Finland	24
Italy	24
Sri Lanka	22
Netherlands	21
Chile	20
Japan	18
Kenya	18
Malaysia	15
European Union	14
Greece	14
Belgium	12
Thailand	10
Austria	9
Mexico	9
New Zealand	9
Singapore	8
Hong Kong SAR China	7
Switzerland	7
Trinidad & Tobago	7
Turkey	7
China	6
Croatia	6
Denmark	6
Indonesia	6
Poland	6
Tanzania	6
Costa Rica	5
Nigeria	5
Peru	5
Romania	5
Russia	5
Serbia	5
Argentina	4
Cook Islands	4
Pakistan	4
Egypt	3
Saudi Arabia	3
Slovenia	3
South Korea	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Algeria	2
Bulgaria	2
Czech Republic	2
El Salvador	2
Ireland	2
Kuwait	2
Portugal	2
Taiwan	2
Åland Islands	1
Bahrain	1
Bangladesh	1
Congo – Kinshasa	1
Curaçao	1
Georgia	1
Guatemala	1
Israel	1
Libya	1
Morocco	1
Myanmar (Burma)	1
Puerto Rico	1
Turks & Caicos Islands	1
Vietnam	1
Zimbabwe	1

Some month I’m going to just repeat the previous month’s map and see if anyone notices. I bet that’s the month I get a reader from Greenland, too.

There’s no countries that were single-view two months in a row. I’m not sure that’s ever happened before that I noticed. I’m happy seeing it, though. If I am going to be barely noticed, at least it can be a broad bare-noticing.

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From the dawn of time to the start of November I had posted 2,830 pieces. These gathered 195,475 total views, from 110,257 logged unique visitors.

WordPress credits me with 14,152 words posted in October, my most laconic month this year. I averaged 416.2 words per posting in October. And that’s with stuff like the Popeye cartoon reviews and the story strip plot recaps bulking out my average. Recapping a Sunday-only strip like Prince Valiant helps. But, this means for the year to date I’ve posted 159,495 words, and have an average for the year of 523 words per post, dropping from 536. We’ll just see what I do about that.

If you’d like to see what I do, add my RSS feed to whatever you use to read essays. If you don’t have an RSS reader? Sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal. You can add any RSS feed — which most every WordPress blog has, and many comic strips and other regularly updated stuff does too — from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. Or, if you have a WordPress account, click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page somewhere.

Thank you all for reading.

Statistics September: How September 2020 Looked At Me, And What For

As I’ve said before I like starting the month with a look at what got read around here, and how much. I’m sure this is going to be fun. WordPress kicked me off the Classic, or “good”, post editor and the New, or “bad” one is really bad. Like, it was annoyingly many steps to embed pictures in yesterday’s Popeye cartoon post. And every attempt working through the Bad editor to embed the video starting at the right time marker failed. I had to post it and then edit it using the back path to get the Good editor back. It takes some doing to screw up stuff like that. Don’t worry. You’ll hear a lot more from me on this topic.

All the statistics I track around here were up this past month, which is to say, good. WordPress reports 4,479 page views in September, which is the third-highest month I have on record. (April 2020 and November 2015 were higher yet.) That’s a good bit above the twelve-month running average of 4,018.7 views per month.

These views came from a recorded 2,623 unique visitors. That, too, is up from the running average 2,347.3. I think that’s also the third-highest unique visitor count, but WordPress doesn’t make that number easy to track. There were 130 things liked, which is above the average 94.4 and the largest number since July of 2019. And there were a positively chatty 41 comments, well above the 25.7 average. That was the greatest volume of comments since April 2020, owing to people turning caps lock on.

You don’t suppose it’s possible I got like a thousand page views between 7:59 pm and 8:00 pm when the new month started, do you?

What articles were popular here? The most popular things published in September were:

• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? The Phantom Head isn’t part of Skull Cave? June – September 2020
• Shoe almost completely on other foot; Bruce Tinsley returning to Mallard Fillmore
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Is banana bread hard to make? June – August 2020
• Today in shocking discoveries from looking at a thing
• Jules Rivera takes over Mark Trail in October

I was, in the interest of fairness, looking for top things posted in August too, but it turns out nothing from August was as popular as the Jules Rivera news. That’ll happen.

I feel like I’m far less popular this month in Africa, but it turns out the difference is two page views from Zambia and one from Ethiopia. Well also that Ukraine wasn’t interested in me this month either.

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77 countries sent me any readers last month. That’s down from August’s 78 and July’s 82, and not at all significantly so. There were ten single-view countries, noticeably down from August’s 18 or July’s 28. I suppose next month there’ll be minus two.

Country	Readers
United States	3,108
India	223
Canada	149
Brazil	135
United Kingdom	114
Australia	103
Philippines	99
Sweden	38
South Africa	34
Germany	32
Norway	31
Italy	27
Finland	26
Spain	25
Japan	23
Netherlands	23
France	15
Denmark	14
Nepal	14
Trinidad & Tobago	14
Mexico	12
Indonesia	11
Belgium	9
Portugal	9
Argentina	8
Singapore	8
Turkey	8
Colombia	7
European Union	7
New Zealand	7
United Arab Emirates	7
Hong Kong SAR China	6
Ireland	6
Switzerland	6
Thailand	6
Chile	5
Honduras	5
Malaysia	5
Peru	5
Slovenia	5
Venezuela	5
Fiji	4
Greece	4
Hungary	4
Qatar	4
Taiwan	4
Austria	3
China	3
Czech Republic	3
Ecuador	3
Guyana	3
Israel	3
Kazakhstan	3
Kuwait	3
Myanmar (Burma)	3
Pakistan	3
Poland	3
South Korea	3
Vietnam	3
Bulgaria	2
Egypt	2
Guadeloupe	2
Kenya	2
Nigeria	2
Puerto Rico	2
Romania	2
Russia	2
Belize	1
Bolivia	1
Costa Rica	1
Croatia	1
El Salvador	1
Iceland	1
Jamaica	1
Maldives	1
Mauritius	1
Paraguay	1 (*)

Paraguay is the only country that was a single-view country in August. And no countries are on a three-month or longer streak. So that’s fun.

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My plan for the next several weeks of story comics is to do these, on these days:

• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (6 October)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (13 October)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (20 October)
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (27 October)
• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (3 November)

All this is subject to revision in case of news or anything getting in my way. I am thinking of what I might shuffle around to make sure the week of Election Day is as low-stress for me as possible, around here at least, for example. I’ll have some What’s Going On In The Story Comics post, or news, at this link. And hopefully a plot recap every Tuesday, Eastern time.

Also in my plans: a long-form essay Thursday evenings, Eastern Time. Also Statistics Saturday posts, Saturday evening, Eastern Time. And I’m hardly out of 1960s Popeye cartoons to talk about Sunday evenings.

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Through the start of October I’d posted 2,799 things here. Those collected 188,327 views from 106,121 unique visitors. WordPress thinks I posted 16,141 words this past month, an average of 538.0 words per posting for all thirty posts. My average post, year to date, has been 548 words, so my goal of writing shorter was going great until I started this post.

If you’d like to be a regular reader here, please click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or if you’d rather read without being tracked, add the RSS feed for this page to your reader. If you don’t think you have a reader, get a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. You can add RSS feeds to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. And my @nebusj Twitter account announces posts. Don’t try to contact me through it, though. Safari often refuses to let me see Twitter. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what the pattern is. Am I going to make the surely slight effort it would be to clear up the problem? No, not this year. Why would I want to see more Twitter than I already do? In 2020? Thank you for your understanding.

Statistics August: People Wanted To Know About The Guy Who Drew Pluggers Last Month

With the month started out I’d like to look at last month. I’d especially like to see that lots of people read and appreciated my writing the past month. But I’ll settle for a day where the post is easy to write.

According to WordPress there were 4,281 pages viewed here in August. That’s the fifth-highest month on record, which is nice. Most of those records have been in the past year; only November 2015, with 4,528 views, is an old high. And that is above the twelve-month running average of 3,969.6 views per month.

There were 2,454 unique visitors, which I think is the fourth-highest I have on record. It’s above the twelve-month running average of 2,311.2 unique visitors, though.

Still not buying this claim about turning a blog into a source of income. I don’t know what they’re selling but I know it’s not legit.

There were 104 things liked in August, above the running average of 96.3 and the biggest month for likes since January. There were also 38 comments, again beating the running average of 23.3. That’s almost as many as in May, so while this is nowhere near the heights of January 2018, it’s at least getting chattier.

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What posts were popular last month? A lot of people wanting to know about comic strip artists changing. Also that months-of-the-year-in-reverse-alphabetical-order thing. But the most popular posts from August last month? These:

• Why does Pluggers look different? Did Gary Brookins stop drawing Pluggers?
• Vintage Phantom: I can see Aunt Elsie’s point
• Why does Shoe look different? Is someone new drawing Shoe? (No; Gary Brookins is still drawing Shoe, as of today. I don’t know when he’s retiring.)
• What Your Favorite Polygon Says About You which is a kind of silly I wish I could write at least once a month.
• The Mystery Of The Call To Customer Service

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78 countries sent me any readers at all in August, down from July’s 82 no significant amount. There’d been 77 of them in May and June. 18 of these were single-reader countries, down from July’s 28 but in line with May and June’s 20.

Would I get a Greenland reader if I mention I finally saw that episode of Conan O’Brien where he went to Greenland and met all 24 inhabitants? … No, it would not.

Country	Readers
United States	3,080
United Kingdom	218
India	198
Canada	142
Australia	69
France	51
Brazil	39
Philippines	38
Spain	27
Finland	23
South Africa	23
Germany	21
Hong Kong SAR China	21
Italy	20
Norway	19
Sweden	18
Trinidad & Tobago	18
Indonesia	16
Malaysia	16
European Union	13
Vietnam	11
Belgium	10
Ireland	10
Poland	10
Mexico	9
Netherlands	9
Slovakia	9
Guadeloupe	8
Taiwan	8
Thailand	8
New Zealand	6
Russia	6
Singapore	6
Switzerland	6
Chile	5
Peru	5
Serbia	5
Egypt	4
Japan	4
Kenya	4
Nigeria	4
Romania	4
South Korea	4
El Salvador	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Argentina	2
Brunei	2
China	2
Colombia	2
Czech Republic	2
Denmark	2
Ecuador	2
Honduras	2
Hungary	2
Lebanon	2
Tunisia	2
Turkey	2
Uganda	2
Ukraine	2
Uzbekistan	2
Zambia	2
American Samoa	1 (*)
Austria	1
Bhutan	1
Caribbean Netherlands	1
Dominican Republic	1
Ethiopia	1
Greece	1
Guatemala	1
Iraq	1
Jordan	1 (*)
Liechtenstein	1
Lithuania	1
Paraguay	1
Portugal	1
Puerto Rico	1 (*)
Slovenia	1
St. Lucia	1
Uruguay	1

American Samoa, Jordan, and Puerto Rico were single-view countries last month too. Lebanon bowed out of single-reader status after six months.

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Which story comics do I plan to cover the next several weeks? Subject to breaking news, of course?

• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (8 September)
• Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (15 September)
• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (22 September)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (29 September)
• Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (6 October)

Whatever I do cover, and any news about any of the story comics, I’ll have in a post at this link.

And my overall plan remains to have a long-form essay Thursday Evening, Eastern Time. Some kind of Statistics Saturday post Saturday evenings, my dad’s favorite feature. Sundays, Popeye cartoons from the 60s. And then What’s Going On In the story comics on Tuesdays. The rest of the week I stare at my scraps file, trying to figure out whether “palindromedome” could ever be a thing. It’s not looking promising.

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From the dawn of time to the dawn of September I’ve posed 2,769 things here. They drew a total 183,846 views from 103,497 unique visitors. WordPress figures I posted 15,621 words in August, an average of 503.9 words per posting. My average post, year to date, had 536 words.

If all this has convinced you to read my blog regularly, please click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on this page. Or if you’d rather read without being tracked, add the RSS feed for this page to your reader. If you don’t think you have a reader, get a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. You can add any RSS feed to your friends page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn as you like. And I do have my semi-accessible @nebusj Twitter account set to announce posts, although I don’t get to read it most of the time. Contact me here if you need me to read what you say. I’m sorry it’s like that but I just don’t want to deal with fixing Twitter’s issues. You understand.

Statistics July: how July 2020 treated Another Blog, Meanwhile

I say that, but I always mean how the readers treated Another Blog, Meanwhile. And by “treated” I mean “looked at one or more pages”. That’s what I’m really here for. Page views and the chance to think of a good joke about Prince Valiant, since nobody else is.

According to WordPress’s counter, in July there were 4,175 pages read here. It’s nice to see that above four thousand. It’s also above the twelve-month running average of 3,911.4 page views. These views came from 2,447 unique visitors, which is higher than the 2,260.6 running average.

The tease to ‘accept payments for just about anything’ is a nice sentiment but it’s not as though I was turning away payments before. The trick is getting anyone to give me money for doing the stuff I have fun doing.

There were 95 things liked in July, which is a bit below the average of 100.3, but at least if my figures are representative, people don’t go liking stuff on WordPress anymore. I get about two-thirds as many likes as I did a year ago, and this with more page views and unique visitors. There were 35 comments given, gratifyingly above the average of 21.8, though.

So regarding the most popular posts: I’m getting a little tired linking to that months-of-the-year-in-reverse-alphabetical-order one. So I thought I’d just list the top five posts from July here. That’s a fine idea except there was a three-way tie for the fifth-most-popular piece, so, fine, have seven links. I’m glad that this includes at least one of my long-form pieces and also a Statistics Saturday piece. It gives a little more balance to things.

• Why does Mark Trail look different? Did James Allen leave Mark Trail? which I actually wrote before the James Allen strips ran out because I figured people were going to start searching for exactly that question. This is as much search engine optimization as I know how to do, and it doesn’t work.
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Why is The Phantom destined for an unmarked grave? May – July 2020
• It looks like we’ve run out of James Allen _Mark Trail_ dailies
• Meanwhile interrupting my thoughts every forty seconds
• In Which I Learn Something Of Great Importance and I’m glad other people are delighted by this recognition.
• Hardly everything there is to say about The Story of Brick
• Statistics Saturday: Visible Comets Of My Lifetime

I should probably do something to account for, like, a post the last day of the month that gets most of its views the next month. But that’s getting to be a little too much work for me.

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Where do my readers come from? For July, they were from 82 countries, a bit above the 77 that I’d seen in June and in May. 28 of them were single-view countries, which is up from the 20 of June and of May. Here’s the roster:

I missed my goal of getting all the nations formerly part of the Federal Republic of Central America: no readers from Costa Rica or El Salvador last month. Maybe next time!

Country	Readers
United States	3,044
India	301
Canada	155
United Kingdom	131
Australia	78
Brazil	40
Finland	38
Germany	33
Sweden	29
Spain	25
France	24
Italy	22
Norway	18
Philippines	15
Austria	14
South Africa	14
South Korea	10
Portugal	9
Taiwan	9
Argentina	7
Indonesia	7
Ireland	7
Mexico	7
New Zealand	7
Poland	7
Netherlands	6
Singapore	6
Belgium	5
Colombia	5
European Union	5
Guatemala	5
Kenya	5
Peru	5
Denmark	4
Malaysia	4
Zambia	4
Bangladesh	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Japan	3
Nigeria	3
Russia	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Albania	2
Belarus	2
Czech Republic	2
Dominican Republic	2
Jamaica	2
Oman	2
Paraguay	2
Saudi Arabia	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
Turkey	2
Venezuela	2
American Samoa	1
Barbados	1
Bermuda	1
Botswana	1
Brunei	1 (*)
Chile	1
China	1
Croatia	1
Cyprus	1 (*)
Ecuador	1
Egypt	1
Estonia	1
Honduras	1
Hungary	1
Israel	1
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1
Lebanon	1 (*****)
Mali	1
Mauritius	1
Nicaragua	1
Pakistan	1
Puerto Rico	1
Romania	1
Slovakia	1 (*)
Ukraine	1
Uruguay	1
Vietnam	1

Brunei, Cyprus, and Slovakia got a single view two months in a row now. Lebanon has had a single page view for each of six months in a row now. I’m not sure whether my longest streak is seven months or what, but that’s one of the longest single-reader streaks out there.

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I’m continuing my plan for stuff to write this coming month. A long-form essay posted Thursday evening, Eastern Time. A Statistics Saturday piece posted Saturday evening, Eastern Time. More Popeye cartoons on Sunday evenings. And on Tuesday evenings What’s Going On In the story comics. My plan, barring special circumstances, is to cover the story comics in this order:

• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (11 August)
• Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley (18 August)
• James Allen and Jack Elrod’s Mark Trail (25 August)
• Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth (1 September)
• Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (8 September)

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As of the start of August I’ve posted 2,738 things. These have drawn 179,564 page views from 101,044 unique visitors. Sorry to have missed you, visitor #100,001. You should have said something. In July I published 15,701 words, for an average of 506.5 words per posting in the month. And that brings my words per posting average for the year down to 541.

I’m happy to have more readers, if you know anyone who’d like to be one. You can subscribe through WordPress by using the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button. Or you can put the RSS feed for posts into any reader you have. This includes free accounts at Dreamwidth or Livejournal, if you don’t have anything else. You can add an RSS feed to your Dreamwidth page from https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ and to your Livejournal friends page from https://www.livejournal.com/syn. I also announce new posts on my @nebusj Twitter account, that I can only sometimes post to manually. So if you need to contact me use literally any other method, including asking people you know if they happen to know me. It’s that bad, but somehow, too low-priority for me to sort out or just use a different web browser on. Sorry.