And happy Bastille Day!
Yeah; I know the French version of our Fourth of July probably doesn't ring many bells with the vast majority of you, but I do know that we have a couple of people who read this everyday who live in France (bonjour, Thierry, bonjour, Nathalie!) so I figure we might as well mark the day, right?
That got me to thinking. And that, as we all know, can be a dangerous thing. I've been writing these little...whatever you wanna call thems for over 20 years now, since 2001. Over those two decades, I wonder how many other countries we've touched? Thankfully, for the past six years, I've used Blogspot to post these, and on the site there's a little thing you can click on to tell you what countries readers are from (or, at least, in which countries the servers they're using to connect to you are located).
So I decided to take a look.
Looking at the statistics for the Blogspot site makes me laugh, on occasion, if only because of some of the, uhm, interesting places from which we get hits. The U.S., of course, always pops up first, followed for perhaps appropriate reasons, countries in which I have friends and have visited—France, or Belgium, or Germany. But then it gets weird. For several months, India provided a large chunk of readers—in fact, I've even received a few nice notes from several of them. At other times, it was South Africa. Recently (and I'm guessing it's more for the bots & spiders & potential hackers than any actual reason) it's been Russia.
How people from those countries stumbled across a blog from a dorky American blathering about the weather I do not know. But apparently it happens, and apparently it happens quite a bit.
So here's the deal—if you read this regularly, or have even just stumbled on it by accident, and you're from a country outside of the U.S., please let me know. My e-mail address is always at the end of each post, and don't worry—I won't mention you in any way. I know almost everyone who reads this does so as a “lurker”, and I'm cool with that. I don't want to “unlurk” you. But I'm curious, so let me know, and we'll see how many people in how many different countries read this.
Who knows...I may then have to start wishing people happy holidays OTHER that Bastille Day. And that would be one of the coolest things that I could do.
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