110522- Thanks and You're Welcome

.....Last week I began posting again exactly a year to the date after I had stopped. If you've read the new posts you may have noticed that they contain contemporary topics and news stories. That was on purpose, so that it will be obvious that they weren't merely leftovers or that they were written over the course of months. I actually had no plans to return to this blog, even late last year when I was exploring the logistics and ethics of possibly monetizing my other blogs. I was comparing their page view statistics to those for this blog, which I hadn't bothered check since I discontinued posting. There were two page views a week attributed to Japan, which I assumed were either mistakes or someone learning English looking for brief statements to translate as exercises. I expected that a blog that had no registered followers and had been inactive for months would provide a baseline reference for minimal activity. Occasional follow-ups showed the views settle into a regular pattern of one view every two days. I put off making a decision on monetizing and forgot about the stats for awhile.

.....About two months ago a tsunami hitting Japan caused shocked reactions in the rest of the world as we all watched massive amounts of water alter topography as easily as it did human lives. Many people were still in the planning stages of offering aid when the real bad news came in: the many buildings effected by the flooding included nuclear power plants and their contingency plans didn't cover impacts of that unprecedented magnitude. Boiling, radioactive water was pouring out of the plants and power outages were widespread and long lasting. I felt horrible at being helpless to do anything about it and wondered how much worse it would feel if I knew anyone in Japan, or had any connection to them.

.....And then I remembered that I did have one, tenuous connection.

.....When I sat down to work on my other blogs and signed in, before starting as planned I first checked the stats for this blog and there they were: two page views this week. I checked the audience: both were from Japan. I started checking every other day and the views continued for a few weeks, every other day and from nowhere else on Earth. Obviously whoever that blip represented was in the side of the country that didn't bear the brunt of the physical impact of the tsunami, but considering the scope and scale of the damage, I can't imagine that anyone in Japan didn't experience an adverse repercussion in some aspect of their lives. Yet during the worst of it they didn't break their routine of checking this blog. I started feeling guilty that I hadn't at least provided them some new material. Then after a few weeks, they stopped. Sometime later, they started up again, this time in the U.S. every forty-two hours, which led me to suspect it was something automated (try arranging a sleep schedule that would allow you to check a blog manually every forty-two hours and you'll see what I mean). After a recent health problem (behind me, I hope) I set out to return my other blogs to regular schedules. Since I was online every day again it seemed fitting to mark last week's "anniversary" with something-- anything-- new. It actually garnered a slight reaction. I wish I had the time/energy/creativity to return to daily jokes, but I only had one badly neglected blog when I started this and now I have three besides this. I can't maintain a daily schedule, but rather than abandon it completely I'm going to try to post weekly. If you're human, check in once a week, starting after next Sunday.