Giving the people what they want

I have been in the house just long enough to not want to leave it anymore.  This morning... I might have.  A nice bike ride, a romp around the gym circuit.  But it was one degree.  So I stayed where I was.

12 hours later, I am beginning to think I could hole up until the rice ran out.  And you know the rice never runs out.

That blue figure  says minus 7.  7 beeel -- ow.  

  This is the kind of night where you just stayed wherever you were, or at the nearest apartment to where you were, because you couldn't face the bus stop.  Always keep a black blazer at work.  This is what we learned.

Now out here in ex-urbs, we wait for the plow, we keep lots of coffee in store, and we wander into crazy tasks like shredding 5 years of 401k statements from the old mill.  Funny story: I rolled that account into my others as soon as I could, but Schwab didn't close it.  Instead, they kept it open to receive my stockholder's class action settlement (Taylor v McIlvey... god rest his soul...).  Now they send me new notices asking how I would like to handle the $160.00 they deposited in it.

And I ran the stats on my new counter, conveniently located at the bottom of this page.  My old counter counted, and told me where people's internet service provider was, but lacked what any serious blogger wants to know:  what did I build that people are coming for?  And how well am I, purely by accident, optimizing my search engine competitiveness?

I am surprised to discover that my top 20 referrers these past 10 days are more like to come from Bing than certain other, more vocal, search engines.  But that's my style, isn't it -- fish in a less popular pond.  Grocery shop from left to right.

What mostly surprised me is that anyone visited this site at all in the past 10 days.  I should probably put something up for them.

Search String Referrers, past 10 days  (that is, something other than searching the name of this blog, or pointing directly from a bookmark) They are not ranked; each one was unique.

A Bing image search for the phrase "caftan cigarette" brought up one of my favorite posts the 70s series, including an unusual gathering of the Mattel elite dressed by Edward Albee.

The phrase "what did girls wear on soul train in the 70s?"  I would think this was a Halloween costume search, except it was in January.  Fortunately, the pic is pretty accurate and not too over the top.

Kosmix is a search engine I never heard of that listed one result for the term "corset" as my post Middle-Aged Ladies and Their Girdles.  This is consistently one of my most frequently visited posts.  I can not tell you why, except that we are all doing a lot of girdle searching.

My buddy Jay at HR Clean-up, and a frequent guest on our little show here as one half of the Tarleton Twins, named DrawingIn one of his top-10 reads, so I pick up a few lookie-lous from there.  He has been more active than I have of late, and much more meaningful, so give him a drop-by, would you?   Jay was just quoted in this week's Boston Business Journal.

More Bing: Cheez-its fun facts.  Well, naturally.
Another for the image "Yuppies," and I have stolen that poster myself.

And lastly, "Mr Peabody cartoon," named here as a tattoo I would get if I believed in tattoos.  I have upped that list to 6 since I saw this: 

Stay warm, America.