Friday 8 September 2017

Eeny, meeny, tekel, upharsin

One of my occasional "State of the Notion" posts, with a suitable mixture of weighing-in-the-balance and counting (in the otherwise totally arbitrary subject line).

In its first twelve months, from October 2012 to September 2013, the Harmless Drudgery blog attracted just over 7000 visits. July 2013 was the only month with more than 1000 visits (1070, to be precise). In the first 5 days of September 2017, the total was just over a thousand (1053 to be precise – another 17 would have supplied a pleasing symmetry, but the gist is clear):

HD visits, courtesy of Blogger
(Of course there are more at time of going to
<whatever> -- almost, already, as many as in August)
Given a following wind, the  total for September should exceed the peaks in April and May of this year, and might approach the December 2016 peak (which I imagine represents teachers catching up with their blog reading over the Christmas break [there's a similar peak at Easter, but attenuated because the lawn has started to need mowing]).

b


PS My  nomination for a TEZZY goes to this site. 
<explanation reference="passim">
The TEZZY awards go (irregularly) to the Time-wasting Site of the Year. The Ur-TEZZY was awarded nearly 3 years ago :
The prestigious Time-wasting Site of the Year Award (familiarly 'Tezzy') goes to the University of Nottingham [2017: a site that explains the origins of place names].
</explanation>
Avoid this one if you have a deadline to meet: it's a guessing game based on sound clips from world languages. I don't know how big the corpus of clips is, but it‘s big enough to keep you "busy" for several kilo-yonks.

b

PPS And a couple of clues:
  • Organic solution is close, but not quite good enough (2,5)
  • Imprisoned the subject of genealogy – jolly angry. (12)
Update: 2017.09.08.15:20 ‐ Added PPPS

PPPS Also, while I think of it, do sign this, although I'm  not sure what good it will do: the meddlesome priest will just have his zealotry heightened. The more signatories to the petition, the greater the Celestial-Jobsworth's self-regarding sense of martyrdom.

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