Posts Tagged ‘links’

April Thank-You Notes

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

To start with an aside, let me say that I have made the move from “thank yous” to “thank-you notes,” thus avoiding a “word” I didn’t like to see in print, but had nonetheless used a few times here. Sometimes the obvious solution to a problem takes a while to become visible. I will not be giving any “shout-outs.”

As usual, this blog got a ten-fold increase in daily visitors while MacSurfer’s Headline News™ had a link to a post (What a Relief! MacBook Pro Overheating Problem Cured—Really) here. Thank you, Darren.

Other Mac sites that continue to send visitors here are PowerBook Central, and LowEnd Mac. Thanks, folks. I’m so glad that I actually have a solution to the MacBook overheating problem to point to now.

My post Some Observations on College Guides and Their Usefulness was included in the Carnival of College Admission: Kick A@$ College Links. Thank you, Elizabeth.

Joe, aka Coonass in italy, referenced and commented on Dante’s Heavenly Vision and the Physics of the Proton in his March 13 post “religion and science.” Thank you again, Joe.

David of D Dubs Reads found a lot to think about in the Dante post and added On-Screen Scientist to his blogroll. Much appreciated, David.

Denyse posted a long excerpt from the Dante piece on her Colliding Universes blog and linked to it. Thanks again, Denyse.

Harry of The Kudzu Files has placed this blog on his Blogopedia list. Thank you, Harry.

I’m programming an iPhone app (baseball related), which is taking a lot of my time, so posting will no doubt continue to be less frequent for a while. I’ll probably record another of the oldies for an audio post before long. Requests welcomed at the email address toward the upper right of this page.

Oh yes, I’m now on twitter as onscrn.

More Searchers Arriving at a Place They Never Imagined

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

I’ve been traveling and otherwise occupied a lot lately, so I’ve really fallen behind my one post a week goal for this blog. I don’t have anything very substantial to post today, but I would like to share some more of the possibly amusing or interesting Google search strings that have brought visitors here.

As I noted before, the most striking thing revealed by an examination of the search strings (of words) people use in Google is how many people approach Google as some sort of artificially intelligent being one can ask questions of, as though of a person. This seems especially to be the case when they have medical concerns (at least pet medical concerns). My post Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig gets a visit or two almost every day, usually from people with a guinea pig they are worried about.

The search strings are sometimes of the hopeless (but Google-appropriate) “how to euthanize a guinea pig” sort, but an extreme example of one treating Google as an online veterinarian (and a psychic one at that) was “My guinea pig has not eaten today and he has a cold. What is up?” In the same vein was: “my son has squeezed our guinea pig will it be ok”.

I used the first of those mentioned above to do my own Google search, and—low and behold—my post came up fifth from the top. Here’s what Google returned for it (word matches in bold):

On-Screen Scientist » Blog Archive » Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig
May 25, 2008 … Our guinea pig, Chestnut, is dying. He will probably be dead before I …. Hopefully the vet is open today. 11:00 am. He’s not, but the … My wife has been felled by the same cold I have presumably, … I say to the intake woman, who is looking at me quizzically, “He hasn’t eaten anything in days. …

Since Google just looks for word matches and doesn’t try to make sense of it all, it came up with a good match, although, except for the “He hasn’t eaten” part, the matched words (today, my, cold) weren’t relevant.

For the second string Google brings up my post third from the top thusly:

On-Screen Scientist » Blog Archive » Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig
May 25, 2008 … Our guinea pig, Chestnut, is dying. He will probably be dead before I …. OK, it’s now the morning of the next day. … He didn’t drink water that was squeezed into his mouth this time, as though reflexes aren’t even working. … Chestnut has been buried in the back yard. My son arrived back from …

Thus, there was a hit on nine out of eleven words (and Google probably ignored “it” and “be” as too common)! Yet the circumstances are totally different, except for the shared anxiety about a guinea pig.

It seems to me that there is sufficient text in the Google excerpts above to have shown the searchers that my post was not what they were looking for, but they came anyway, either through blind clicking or just because it was obvious my post dealt with a dying guinea pig, which was a subject on their mind.

The search string “guinea pig isplaying dead after popcorning” brought someone here too. I hope the “playing dead” wasn’t wishful thinking, if the searcher was referring to his  or her own animal. I had never heard of guinea pigs playing dead (possums, yes), but Google finds a YouTube video (which I haven’t watched) claiming to show this phenomenon. Another ask-the-vet type string was “do antibiotics make guinea pigs tired”. This was a good match by Google’s standards, since my post contains all the words, though, of course, no answer to the question. I also fear that that animal was suffering from something worse than antibiotic side effects.

So it goes. People with sick animals or sick computers go online to look for help, and some of them end up in this out-of-the-way spot. I see several people arriving here daily with MacBook overheating problems (or worries) of one kind or another, which shows it is a real problem, though I suppose not a sufficiently serious one for Apple to deal with publicly. The computer users with problems typically have a better idea of how Google works than the guinea pig owners; they just put in a string of keywords for their searches.

Many other search matches must be the result of coincidence, though it’s not always obvious how. The string “black bean death lottery cycling club” leads Google to put my post Times I Might Have Died as number one on the candidate list, since it contains all the words except “cycling” and “club” (though it does deal with my early bicycle riding). It’s unlikely my post was what the searcher had in mind, but whatever it was, it must not be on the world-wide web, for nothing shows up containing that very specific collection of words.

It may well have been a job hunter that searched for “physics phd fbi”; but, whoever it was, found the following as number eight on Google’s list:

On-Screen Scientist » Blog Archive » Why Gamble? Hire a Physicist.
I should add that when a physics professor called Ron about hiring me several months … what hourly rate I should get as a new Physics PhD (or near-PhD, whichever it was). …. My Appointment with the FBI and a Long-Delayed Connection …

A somewhat interesting point here is that “Physics PhD” was found in the text of the indicated blog post, while “FBI” appeared in the sidebar listing of the titles of recent posts, so even if the person had been looking for my FBI appointment post he wouldn’t have gotten to it directly. Something to keep in mind when searching.

What was the searcher for “trees shame” after, I wonder? I’d like to think it was someone who’d read my post A Painful Christmas Blessing and wanted to come back to it or to direct someone else to it; and my post does come in at number seven in the Google list, but there’s nothing definitive about the two words and no way to know what the intent was. Still, as in all these cases, the searcher did come here, or I wouldn’t know about it.

My post about exchanges with commenters on an atheist blog, Conversations in the Clubhouse of Truly Smart People, has also brought a few people here via Google searches with other purposes. I feel bad about not having advice for those who seem to be seeking it: for example the one searching on “what smart people say in conversations” and the one searching for “smart things to say in conversations”; young people, I hope. Then, there was the one possibly looking for confirmation of his own observation that it’s best to “never let people know how smart you truly are.” I’m taking that to mean that it’s better to play dumb a little, but it could mean never let them find out how dumb you truly are, which has aways been my concern.

I’ve been at this blogging for almost a year now. Thanks to all who have read and especially to those who have written to me (email address towards upper right) these past months.

What Brings You Here?

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I thought I’d share with you some observations which I’ve found interesting or amusing about how people arrive at this obscure corner of the blogosphere. People come to this blog by different paths. Some visitors have been here before and check back now and then, whether looking for something new or browsing through older posts. Some come using a link made by another blogger, and others will come via a link I’ve embedded in a comment that I’ve made on another blog. A few will come as a result of an email I’ve sent them, having noticed some overlap of interests. Some days a big majority of visitors arrive courtesy of Google search results, although other search engines play a role; and such search-initiated visits are always a substantial fraction of the total.

How do I know where people are coming from? When anyone visits a site, some information about the visit gets logged, such as the web page from which the visitor just came, if there was one. I use a WordPress plugin that tallies some of this information, and Google Feedburner does much the same, adding counts of which browsers people are using and the top few cities (but not States) people have come from. Since my total visitor count is low, most of the cities listed have only one representative on a given day, and I’m not sure what determines which ones get listed. The countries in which the cities are located are indicated by national flags, and it’s quite gratifying to see on the list a number of flags I can’t even identify. Because of ongoing worldwide interest in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and peoples’ fears about it, a significant percentage of the visitors Feedburner shows are from foreign countries, sometimes more than half. The US flag by a city is not sufficient to identify the State of many cities with certainty because of all the multiple examples of city names. I was recently surprised to see a U.S. city called Wasilli listed, for which I would never have been able to guess the State a short while back, but now feel pretty sure of.

The search terms people use to find their way here are generally the most interesting data collected about visits. In all the examples that follow I am keeping the original spelling (frequently misspelling) found in the search terms. Many people, evidently overestimating Google’s artificial IQ, seem not to know that it looks for word matches; they write out questions such as (one of my favorites): “why are smart people never understood in conversation[?]” Through word matching, that search naturally brought the frustrated conversationalist to my post Conversations in the Clubhouse of Truly Smart People, which comes second from the top in the Google search. I know the feeling, pal, but I’m afraid my post didn’t help you. Another visitor to the same post was searching for the answer to the question “are the smart people religious or atheist[?]”. I don’t know if he was helped or not. I’ve noted that having the word “scientist” in the very name of the blog increases the likelihood of ridiculous matches to search terms.

Sometimes the Google search terms used make it seem very likely that a visitor was either returning to see a post again or was following someone else’s recommendation to track it down. I’ve recently seen a few visitors (or perhaps the same one repeatedly) that came here as the result of a Google search on “the perfect italian woman,” which happens to be the title of one my earlier posts. Unless Richard Dawkins has decided my notion of the clubhouse of truly smart people was too good an idea not to implement for his atheist buddies, the Google search on “richard dawkins clubhouse,” which turns up the Clubhouse post referred to in the previous paragraph as number one, must fit into the category of a search made in order to return to a previously read post. I’m guessing that “scientist rest in peace,” which turns up my post Ronnie Knox, Rest in Peace in fifth Google position for obvious reasons of word matching and was used by a couple of visitors in the space of a week, also belongs to this class of returns or pass-alongs, but there’s no way to be sure. Ronnie Knox, by the way, with additional words such as “UCLA”, “quarterback”, and “football” brings in a steady trickle of visitors, so I feel the blog is providing a service to those wondering whatever happened to the guy.

I was amused to see that one visitor had arrived here due to a search for “professor otto rossler+crazy.” Now I never came right out and said Rössler (one of the LHC end-of-the-worlders) was crazy by explicitly using that word; but I did point out some evidence that his grip on reality seems quite tenuous. I see that as I write On-Screen Scientist » Otto Rössler is the third listing in Google for that particular combination of words. It ranks so high because the word “crazy” does appear in this quote from Rössler himself about his “Lampsacus” web page: “This is the most crazy homepage ever written.” It seems a source of pride to him, and he does play the role of the mad scientist—sixty-eight-year-old hippie dreamer out to save the world variety—rather well. Rössler and his co-troublemaker Rainer Plaga (though their LHC doomsday scenarios are mutually exclusive) bring in more Google-based traffic than even the hot MacBook Pro post, but they are usually of the plain “Rainer Plaga LHC” type.

Even searches based on false premises—e.g., “large hadron collider in texas cancelled due to religion,” which gives the wrong name for the Superconducting Super Collider and the wrong reason for its cancellation—can lead to a real web page through word matching, and my page referencing the LHC tag turns up fifth in Google since it mentions both the LHC and the SSC and its cancellation.

One of strangest Google searches I’ve seen to point to this blog is “example of left-bound manuscript about personality, fitness and health.” That seems such a bizarre stretch that it makes me wonder if that person doesn’t have some way of obfuscating his actual search string, or if perhaps Feedburner had a minor seizure at just the right time to misdirect someone else’s results to mine. What was the person who searched using “How to write a letter asking for a chemical as gift from a scientist?” planning to do, and where did that person get the idea that the answer could be found on the internet? Whatever link Google found to this blog must have been buried very deeply in the list; but since none of the ones above it would have had the answer either, might as well keep trying, the visitor must have thought.

Among those visitors least satisfied was probably the one who was pointed here by a Google search on “realistic ‘gender switch.’” Hoping perhaps for a detailed before-and-after display, he or she no doubt arrived here because of my discussion of Proust’s inadequate depiction of Albertine in the post Reading Proust for the Last Time—only to find no pictures at all. Another bound to have been disappointed was the visitor led to my post Times I Might Have Died by a search for “Russian scientiest hit by a car died and came back to life.” Sounds as though I must have missed something big, but I can’t keep up with everything.

The aforementioned post The Perfect Italian Woman has been a magnet for people following false leads. The post fails to answer the question “why are european women perfect[?]” posed a few weeks ago by a visitor. It sheds no light on who might be the “most beatiful scientis woman.” Nor does it offer photos of “beautiful young italian women.” Unless “where to meet women in torino” was one of those searches by someone trying to get back to the post, I’m afraid a lonely searcher found nothing of value, unless he was really starting from scratch, and a story from twenty-five years ago could help. If you haven’t read the post, then you can’t appreciate the irony of having the search on “how to approach an italian woman” lead to it.

My post Last Days of Chestnut, Guinea Pig has brought visitors via painfully sad Google searches such as “rotting guinea pig foot,” “guinea pig end of life signs,” “guinea pig whimpering meaning,” “how to put a guinea pig out of misery humanly,” and “how far down to bury dead guinea pig.” I can try to dispel the sad thoughts engendered by those search terms by contemplating the absurdity of coming to the post via the Google search on “what scientist know about the pig.”

Let me close with a Google link from a search conducted by a none-too-literate and somewhat confused student (presumably), a match probably due to my dubious use of “thank yous” as the way to convey the idea of saying “thank you” multiple times in posts in which I wanted to acknowledge other bloggers. Anyway, the search was on “how is history yous in math.” I can’t say it’s funny exactly, but solving the puzzle of what the “yous” meant and then considering the idea of history being used in math just set something ringing in a funny part of my brain. It’s at least a clear reminder that the internet cannot be a substitute for “old-fashioned” education.

A Commercial (with Money-Saving Coupon), Some Thank Yous, and an Animal Identification

Friday, September 26th, 2008

First, the big news: OnScreen DNA’s price has been reduced by $30! The standard edition of OnScreen DNA is now $39, and the Pro edition, which empowers user-controlled simulations of gene transcription and DNA replication, costs $69. You can read the press release; but, if you haven’t already—just to get an idea of how much easier it is to visualize and understand DNA’s double helical structure and the chemical bonds that underly it when you have a three-dimensional model to play with—why not download OnScreen DNA Lite (it’s free)?

OnScreen DNA is a virtual model, of course, which is good from a number of standpoints. It costs a lot less than a hardware one, and it can be animated to show the essential three-dimensional details of how DNA works. If you know someone who teaches DNA at any level, please tell them about OnScreen DNA. If you’ve wanted to come to a deeper understanding of DNA and how genes work yourself, please note that it is now a lot easier and less expensive to do so.

As an extra inducement to readers of this blog to try OnScreen DNA, here’s a coupon code to save an additional $20: hs908. Just enter that code in the appropriate box on the order page to get OnScreen DNA for only $19. This won’t work forever, so don’t count on it being there a month from now. OK, commercial over.

I need to catch up on thank yous and acknowledgements. As always, another blog’s linking to this one implies no endorsement of views in either direction.

David, the Christian physicist and novelist who writes the He Lives blog, linked to Conversations in the Club of Truly Smart People. Thanks again, David. Another Dave, he of the Not the Religious Type blog, mentioned the same post favorably and linked to On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism. Thank you, Dave. Ropata of the Earth is My Favorite Planet blog also linked to the Bad Habits post. Thanks, Ropata.

Denyse, a very busy Catholic journalist and author on topics of religion and science, keeps three blogs going. We have exchanged some emails, and she has added the onscreen-scientist to the blog roll of Colliding Universes, which I’d say examines physics and biology from a thoughtful Intelligent Design standpoint. She also (with comments) linked to the two previously mentioned posts related to atheism and to the one on animal suffering, Cries in the Night. Thank you, Denyse.

My post about the anti-LHC campaign, Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?, coming as it did a couple of days before the first proton beam circulated in the LHC, drew more traffic than even the computer troubleshooting ones have in the past. John of the Refugees from the City blog linked to my aforementioned LHC post in two separate posts: Mixed Nuts, in which he makes a thorough exposé of the dishonestly exaggerated credentials of Walter Wagner, the main instigator of the doomsday hysteria, and also looks at Rainer Plaga’s background and work, and Whooooo Hoooooo!, which summarizes the credentials of all notable LHC opponents. Thanks, John.

I have also exchanged emails with JoWynn, who wrote to tell me how much she and her husband appreciated my Reading Proust for the Last Time post. JoWynn, in addition to being a voracious reader (including books on particle physics!), maintains a blog largely devoted to her embroidery art (Parkview 616), despite a disabling condition that confines her to one room most of the time. Thanks, JoWynn. Judy of the Reading Proust in Foxborough blog said good things about the Proust post and also linked to it. Thanks again, Judy.

Finally, I’ve decided that the predatory animal whose strange wild sounds I couldn’t identify in my Cries in the Night post was almost certainly a raccoon, based on some sounds I’ve found online. It’s funny that out of all the raccoons I’ve seen in my life, I’ve never heard one make a sound that I can remember. So, just to return to that disturbing death struggle I overheard in the middle of the night, I now imagine that it was a raccoon that had caught a squirrel. The raccoon, lacking big, powerful jaws like a dog, could have been holding the squirrel in its mouth waiting for it to die of blood loss, internal injuries, etc. The squirrel, being still alive, could have made its cries and also have mustered up the strength for a desperate struggle to escape every few minutes, which would explain the fierce raccoon sounds mixed with thrashing around that I heard periodically.

On the one hand, I’d just as soon get those sounds and speculation about what was going on out of my head, but it’s also good to have the drama linked to known animals. It changes my view of raccoons, which I had known to be scrappy fighters by reputation (able to drown dogs that were foolish enough to pursue them into the water, for example), but had never seen or heard in action.

August Thank Yous and a Pledge of (Almost) No Politics

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

It’s time I once again acknowledged some kind words and links from others in that vast and brave new world we call the blogosphere. From my tiny home planet, establishing communication with one of the millions of other bloggers out there still seems to me something like a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) contact. Needless to say (well almost, or why say it?), in thanking people that have linked to this blog I am not necessarily endorsing the religious, political, or literary opinions they express on their blogs, which are, in any case, quite likely to be in disagreement with one another.

Tiffany, a librarian who loves to read and who lives in my home State of Texas, writes a blog called Considering All Things Literary. After reading Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I, she honored the On-Screen Scientist blog with a place on her list of Literary Links and Other Fun Perusings. Thanks, Tiffany.

Joe, a blogging oil field worker, writes FarSouth of I-10, which is currently following his thoughts and adventures as he makes the transition from South America to Italy. He recently added a link here with these words: “There’s Bob the Onscreen scientist that sometimes sounds like Bill Gates and other days sounds like St. Paul,” which demonstrates Joe’s ability to use ludicrous comparisons for humorous effect, while at the same time making an accurate point about the varied content of this blog. Thanks again, Joe.

The St. Paul reference was doubtless due to my recent post called On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism, which caught the eye of a few bloggers who write from a Christian perspective and who linked to it. David, a physics professor and novelist who has an interesting blog (He Lives: Reformed views of a nuclear physicist) largely dealing with Christian theology and issues of science and religion, included a link to my post in a short one of his own, which link continues to bring in daily a few readers (or five-second scanners, one never knows) even a couple of weeks later. Thanks, David.

Eric posted a short note (“A physicist’s conversion from atheism to theism”) and an excerpt from the atheism post on July 23, 2008 at In the Agora, which is a group blog I’m very happy to have been noticed by. Thank you, Eric.

Josh, whose blog Quid Sit? deals with “Catholicism, Art, Culture, & Everything in Between,” linked to the atheism post with one of his own called I Kicked Them Both, Too. He noted that, though our ages were very different, our experiences were similar. Thank you, Josh. Jesse of Karate and Whatnot from VA also recommended the atheism post with a link. Thanks, Jesse.

How have other bloggers found out about this blog before linking? In a few cases, I have emailed them about some post here that I thought they might be interested in based on what I could tell from their blogs. (Every blogger should include an email address! To email me, look to the upper right portion of any page of this blog.) Others have seen a reference somewhere else. I got a digg (in the OffBeat/Odd Stuff category!) for the atheism post, which may have been the source of a link or two. Thanks, yoder. And of course bloggers read blogs, which is another possible source of links, once one has been made somewhere.

As was predictable, I guess, the atheism post was, after the computer trouble-shooting experience posts, the one that has drawn the most visitors in this blog’s short life. A good number of those visits came from a blog devoted to atheism where I had left a comment mentioning the post. I plan to tell more about the (for the most part respectful) back and forth between me and some commenters at that blog in an upcoming entry.

My intent is still mainly to avoid religion and politics here, but in writing about my life that is well nigh impossible, so religion will no doubt be touched upon from the personal standpoint from time to time. I have more or less promised to trace over time the significant steps in my path from atheism to theism, which of course are very important to me, and I hope of interest and possible benefit to others.

In politics, I am a somewhat hopeful cynic, in the sense that I hope for the best, despite my disappointment and lack of confidence in politicians and parties. I try to maintain a good deal of emotional detachment, even while being very interested in the Presidential campaign as a national and personal (for the candidates) drama. Though no longer committed to the “no support to either of the Capitalist parties” position of my radical past, I find my disinclination to become a partisan of either major party is still strong, even without the ideological basis, mainly because of what seems to be the pervasive corruption and shallowness of the two parties. Now that I think about it, I might express the danger of strong partisanship as being one of potential idolatry (worship of a man-made god), but I don’t feel I am very tempted in that direction.

It’s also hard for me to imagine myself becoming enthusiastic about an individual candidate (I tried for a while this election), though I will consider voting for a major party candidate now, which I would not have done in the past. No longer viewing political change as the potential solution to all of life’s problems, I am more willing to try to judge what seems to be the best realistic alternative at a given time, but with low expectations, mixed with hope that it won’t make too much difference who wins. I might add that I don’t view the threat of radical Islam and terrorism as a phony one concocted by the Republicans.

Who cares what I think, anyway? There are more than enough political commentary blogs for just about any political viewpoint one could wish to see, and I am not going to add another. Most people want to read political commentary they already agree with. Whatever interest this blog may have will be due to some possibly unexpected resonance my experience has with that of the reader or from some observation I make that seems more original than any I might make about politics.

More Thank Yous to Start June

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

I need to get caught up on some thank yous to sundry fellow bloggers that have taken the trouble to visit, read, and then link, sometimes with very nice compliments included on their pages. It also gives me an opportunity to point my many readers in new directions. I find the blogosphere to be so large as to be overwhelming. Looking at the virtually endless list of blogs in a blog directory can truly make me a bit sick with vague dismay. But, along with the myriad dull plastic needles in that worldwide haystack, there are many sharp ones of genuine steel, worthy of close examination and perhaps useful for spiritual mending or embroidering. I was glad to come across a few more of these, and, believe me, I appreciate the needle-grabbing magnets other bloggers have supplied to their readers in the form of links to this blog.

Christina, who runs the Everything Worth Reading monthly blog carnival (one of the few “carnivals” a themeless blog like this one can submit to), honored The Perfect Italian Woman as one of the worth-reading selections for the April 23 edition and with the Link of the Week (think she meant month) designation. Thank you, Christina.

Baseball in Normandy mainly recounts the fortunes of the Bois-Guillaume Woodchucks, an entry in the Normandy section of the French Baseball League (whose existence was a welcome discovery for me). I hadn’t heard of most of the towns in the league, but Dunkerque and Cherbourg are familiar from World War II. Chris, who is on the team’s roster and writes the blog, also occasionally reminisces about baseball in his younger days in the States. Chris refers to himself as an ex-philosopher, but how do you stop being that? A post called Best Baseball Memory and Rick Silva, which turned out to be very well written, was what drew me to his blog. I was looking for other baseball reminiscers after I’d written A Rocky Little League Start.

I emailed Chris, thinking he might be interested in my piece, and it turned out he was. He read it and liked it, so I also told him about the follow-up It’s Only One Game when it was posted. A bit later I was pleased to see a few folks coming to this blog as a result of a post of Chris’s called Introducing Bob Estes (a nom de correspondance of your On-Screen Scientist) with a link to the two Little League coaching posts. I haven’t checked on the Chucks’ fortunes in a few days. They finished in first place during the regular season and were about to begin playoffs last time I read about them. Earlier, their season had seemed in jeopardy due to the sound (like a gun shot) foul balls make hitting the slate roofs of houses (including the mayor’s) near the field. I’ve wanted to visit the D-Day Landing sites for a long time. Now I hope I can make that trip happen during the baseball season. Thank you Chris.

Helena, an Australian lady who blogs as Dysthymiac, emailed comments about the dangerous (naturally produced) drug testosterone in regard to the risky juvenile behavior recounted in my post Times I Might Have Died, which she came to having seen a comment I’d made about a beautiful photograph elsewhere. She has since read and liked Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I and has recommended it on a couple of blogs I know of. We have exchanged emails on various topics of overlapping interest (e.g., Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Billy Sol What’s-his-name, and the blogosphere), and she has added a blogroll-type link to here on her blog. Thank you, Helena.

Norm Geras’s links contain numerous interesting blogs. One I found that way is Far-South-of-I-10, which is written by Joe, a guy who has spent years working on oil rigs and is currently in Columbia about to move to Italy. I thought he might be interested in The Perfect Italian Woman, to which I referred him. He responded with a cordial and complimentary email. Later I saw that my post Times I Might Have Died may have given him the idea to write Dancing With Death about a truly harrowing job experience on an oil rig. Joe’s gift for humorous narrative makes the story—even if your fear of heights is as strong as mine—a pleasure to read. Thank you, Joe.

A few days ago I became aware of Sports Illustrated and Proust, another blog post that referenced my Ronnie Knox, Marcel Proust, and I piece. Seeing that I had found the 1958 reference in which Ronnie Knox mentioned Proust, Michael of Orange Crate Art decided to utilize the full Sports Illustrated online archives to see just how many times and in what way Proust had been mentioned by SI in its history. So far, no Petite Bande references in the Swimsuit issue. In one excerpt, I’m afraid an NFL player was pulling the sportswriter’s leg, but the player must at least have taken some review courses in college to be able to reel off the names that he did. Referring to his reading preferences, the player said that he couldn’t abide fiction, except for “Dostoevsky and Melville,” preferring to spend his time reading “sociology, philosophy and political thought” as found in “Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Mill.” And above all, Kafka. I don’t mean to say that stuff’s not there in Proust in Kafka, but it’s still fiction. Thank you, Michael.

Sure, I read political and news blogs, but I don’t think the world needs another one, so I am not planning to join in. I am delighted to find other sorts of blogs in which people far and wide are writing well about things from their lives and thoughts which can be of interest to a number of people outside the small circle of family and friends—if only to a very small percentage of all internet users. May this blog come to be one of them.