Yes, you found the mother load!

Someone searched "blogs of retired old people" on Google and found me.

So I looked at what else, besides me, this search turned up.

Old Democrats blogging for Obama

Blog catalog using retired folks as a topic

Senior citizen humor--check out the 91 year old stripper

The New Old Age, NYT blog on aging

Retirement home for old horses

Stix Blog

And others. You get the idea. Old people are blogging.

Site Meter Reports foreign visits

In the last few hours I've had visits from

A Corua, Galicia, Spain

Brussels, Belgium

Perth, Western Australia

Via Del Mar, Valparaiso Chile

Saint-Mand, Ile-de-France

Leeds U.K.

New Delhi, India

Seoul, Korea

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Tel Aviv, Israel

Burnaby, British Columbia

Many cities in Ontario

Zagreb, Croatia

Pretoria, South Africa
I hope they found what they were looking for.

Site Meter Reports

It's been a reasonably busy week here at the old blog, now over 6 years old. About 3,750 pages were viewed--that's about 1,000 more than "visits." Even so, that's not an indicator of readership, because Google or Yahoo any number of other crawlers might find my blog and so it shows a "hit list" but the searcher might choose 2 entries above it, read that and never get to mine. And the search engines might pick up words randomly on the page like something from the quote at the top, a line from poetry, and then a recipe causing some real head scratching. This past week my blog on Neal Boortz's story (fictional) on the Carrington Automotive Enterprises was picking up 20-30 hits per 100, or about 40 a day, and something on guy paper dolls I did years ago was grabbing about 15 a day (100 is a free service and so that's my ideal price range, nor do I pay to see who is visiting--but many do). The first week in November my issue three (guest blogger) was very popular--wish I'd written it! The Carrington story is zipping around the internet via e-mail and it's very good. It's an illustration of small business taxes and just how easy it is to be called "rich" in Obama fantasy land of redistributive wealth. At least one of my anonymous readers, probably John, just goes bonkers that it's not a REAL example of a REAL Sub-S corporation. There's a lot of truth in fiction, parables, myths, legends, fables, morality plays and fairy tales--maybe moreso that the evening news. In order to disagree with the truth, some go after the genre. Like the conversation with my shoulder pads when it was finally time for them to go. Honest, I really don't talk to my clothes.

Site meter jumps

My site meter that records hits jumped about 40 a day here recently. The two bigggies? HR 3200 and cottage cheese. The house bill I can understand, but cottage cheese? Has there been a big story about it recently?

How to miss the point with Google

Finding the mysterious ways readers get to your blog is a never ending source of delight for bloggers. Today I found that a search on "worms in oreo cookies" brought someone here. That was a real head scratcher and I just couldn't resist following the link. It was this one:
On being white in America.

The phrases that Google wisdom found were

"Although I haven't found a scholarly article that traces when the worm turned and it became bad to be White in America, . . ."

plus

"Increasingly, being Catholic, if you are also white, will get you no "brownie points" (pardon the pun); and if you are a middle-class or wealthy African-American, you just might be white on the inside (oreo) and have sold out your heritage since you are too rich and educated to be an Uncle Tom."

Isn't Google amazing? But I've seen even stranger leaps from people who actually read the blog entry!

But sometimes, I check the search back, and this one to the AOL robot/spider search, and find information I'm interested in, like today's AOL: "womans home companion magazine-paper dolls" brought someone here, but by back tracking, I found many more sites about magazine paper dolls I hadn't checked.

Ten years ago we librarians used to say that the WWW was like a library where everything was on the floor, or like hunting through someone else's garage, but it's much better organized these days with so many finding aids. More like the books and magazines I store in the bathroom.

Questions that found my blog today

Roten cheese and saling ships.

why isnt good for the health the fungus from the roten cheese

phil dirt and the dozers lyrics to aarp song

rachel carson silent spring professor sierra club 43 fiction years pheasant shell

short poems on saling ships std 1

look how fast i can type without even looking at the words i can type so so fast. i bet you are jealous! so, i can teach you for this one time fee of $25.99!!!

senior citizens earn their paychecks

Living with my 88 year old father-in-law is affectinf my health

Reference questions

Today when you go to the library, ask a question. Try to find a librarian, though. I don't think it gives the staff quite the same sense of "ah-ha, a live one" that a librarian (MLS from an accredited institution) experiences. "Where's the rest room?" or "Can you fix the printer?" don't count.

I love to read through the questions that bring people to my site. Because I write on so many topics, these robotic spiders scroll around a page and match up some strange words or sentences--like the first name of a mayor's wife with the Latin name of a plant. Not quite up to my road kill or black birds in a pie diseases that I used to get at the Vet Library, but interesting. Since about 9 p.m. last night these are some of the more interesting questions that brought people to my blog. I get anywhere from 120 to 180 hits a day, depending on what I'm writing about. If a big poo-bah blogger links to me, it might spike to 350 for a few days. Sometimes they just glance and move on, sometimes they stay for 30 minutes to an hour.

who administers zostavax in san antonio? [Let me get back to you on that]

how to do my thoughts [just stir gently and half bake]

lakeside "raccoon run" results [do you want 2008? I have photos but no results]

abercrombie and fitz "the christmas field guide" [Yes, I'm getting Christmas catalogs too]

24th mapping squadron [I'm 3rd from the top on this one]

dadsandsons near blogspot [is this a boolean question]

"catholic social doctrine" "joe biden" [bingo]

how come there are so many anti-obama books and no anti-mccain books [probably because no one thought he'd be the candidate--check Daily Kos--they hate him and Sarah over there]

orbiter can opener review [I have a great review on this topic--even a photo]

cnn report, in 2008, new peal medicine for cancer used in europe [this sounds fascinating but I'm not sure what "peal" is. Learn to type in just the key words

Dear Valued Customer

Rarely do I get a letter from a company that starts that way and ends well, but this one did. I have used the freebie from SiteMeter since I started blogging 5 years ago, and so do most of the bloggers I visit, because yesterday I was frantically looking at them. SiteMeter had "upgraded" and I'd lost every reason I'd used them, including my total count, which I figured was about 245,500. What was available to me was totally worthless, so I fired off an e-mail of complaint. Apparently several thousand others must have too.

Dear Valued SiteMeter Customers,

As you’re no doubt aware by now, we’ve chosen to roll back our website to the previous “classic” version.

Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely."

Ya think? Today, my old version with the features I like was back, but if I'd had more time to pursue it yesterday, I would have already replaced the code and would never have known I'd been switched back.

There's a very basic marketing principal in business and in relationships. You can't give away something and then later change your plan and expect people to value your product and pay for money what used to be given away.

SiteMeter and blogspot having a problem

Imagine my surprise when IE said it wouldn't open my blog! I refuse to do any add-ons since the laptop is so touchy, so I didn't want to try Firefox. So I poked around on the various discussion lists and someone said SiteMeter was the problem. I really hesitated to pull it, because I really like that system (it's free and easy for non-techies like me), but oh well. ZIP, now I seem to be working again.

4707

I love Google, but. . .

this plan was really dumb. High tech route to terrorism and treason.

"The Pentagon has put the kibosh on Google Street View's access to military bases. The access restriction surfaced after a Google street mapping team took photos on the grounds of Fort Sam Houston in Texas and posted them to the site. U.S. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, chief of the U.S. Northern Command, reportedly said the images compromised security by showing the location of guards, details about barrier operation and building portals. Google removed the images at the Department of Defense's request." Story at TechNewsWorld by Jim Offner, 3/7/08

I think that some of these companies like Facebook, AOL, Google, Yahoo, etc. who claim they are "sensitive" to privacy concerns are run by people too young to understand security--personal or national. For instance, if I wanted to, I could purchase a site tracker for my blog that could probably figure out exactly where your computer is, then what you're buying from AOL, and then through a subscription to another program where your medical records are; but there's no cost to find out what you look like, and how close the 2nd story window of your house is to an access road. I occasionally wander into a website by accident that tells me more about me and my behavior on the computer than I remember, including a comment I made on a listserv or usenet bulletin board 13 years ago and who my grandparents were! (I don't post my genealogy on the web, but others do.)

I won't even go into what I could uncover about your hospital records--I spent some time fiddling with that a few years ago and was so frightened, I just stopped. I really didn't want to know--and I was just using the limited, "free" access to find out the profit of "non-profit" hospitals. Before my husband retired (sole proprietor with me as the staff), I used our county auditor's website extensively--it saved us the time of driving to the property, taking photographs and measuring the set backs and access. What? You think criminals don't use computers?

One time I alerted our church pre-school director about how much information I could track about families of her staff in just a few minutes, using completely free things like Google mapping, on-line local newspapers, and the image feature. Most of my e-mails to the church are ignored or don't address my concerns, so I don't know if anything was done. For years I would suggest to the OSU Libraries that our SS# not be our library access number--I don't know if that has been changed, and God only knows what else it is linked to. Here's my real concern: the university runs on low paid, student labor much more knowledgeable about computers than the faculty or administrators--if it (and other universities) had to find staff that smart and at those wages, they'd have to close down (many are foreign, non-citizens, btw, and all our universities have become dependent on foreign governments to pay their tuition costs).

Just a note about Facebook--no, two notes: The creator, Mark Zuckerberg, is now 23 and has a personal worth of 3 Billion dollars, and Facebook is valued at 15 Billion, according to WSJ. He started at age 19 by illegally hacking into the university's database of student records. The second question: did either of the 2 college women whose murders have recently been saturating the cable news networks have their photos and activities on an internet social networking site, like Facebook?

Checking the stats

They are way down. Don't know why, but there's been about a 1/3 drop since last fall. I know I'm tough and I don't write about comfortable things, but that has always been the case. Certain topics always bring people in--like the Dodge Magnum. Yes, that's one of my most popular entries; and fixing broken zippers, opening frozen door locks and my Fornesetti Julia plates.

Lately there's been an uptick on Agnes Sanford. Maybe she was mentioned on a Christian talk show and people have been googling her (she died in the 1980s). I wrote about her maybe 1.5 years ago, and here's a rerun, just in time for the Halloween stories of spirits and vibes.

Agnes Sanford belongs in a public library

but not in a church library. I was browsing our Mill Run campus library today (I volunteer at and use the church library at our Lytham Road location) and saw her autobiography on the shelf. I don't know why Christians think Sanford is a Christian, but they do (God has the final say, but I don't think she recanted her writings). Even pastors who don't appear to make serious errors about other teachings see no harm. Sure, she was a sweet, dear lady (died in 1982) who said and wrote "spiritual" things, but if you get a paperback of one of her titles and underline the nonbiblical drivel in red, and the Gospel based material in green, you'll see my point. About 25 years ago I actually did that, and hid her books in my laundry room packed inside an old briefcase. And although I don't believe her nonsense about vibrations, and auras and spirits, I could swear I felt a heaviness unrelated to the ironing basket when I entered that room. So I threw them out. Better she should give off her vibes at the dump rather than inside my house or the church building--if you believe that sort of stuff, and she does. What makes her so harmful is that she has so many spiritual descendants who are still speaking and writing on the inner healing circuit. It's snake oil folks. Don't be taken in.

I'm thinking that there are just fewer people looking for the Dodge Magnum, but it still gets my vote as the best looking car on the road. It's being "refreshed" for 2008--hope they don't ruin it.