February 24, 2011

Andy Griffith and Blogger Stats

So, yesterday I discovered Blog Stats. I know, it's simple and stupid and I should've been more in touch with the now generation of Vox Populism and becomingtrubie who consider stats and analytics the same way I used to consider Dill Pickle Chips, Jolt Cola, and Saved by the Bell: things you must consume everyday.

Turns out, my post "Top 5 Musicians with Muscles" gets a lot of hits (mostly it appears, through people who google Iggy Pop Muscles). That was a fun one.

My most contentious post has been "The Worst Sport in the World: Volleyball." When it first came out, I had a few emails from people who called me Fat for not liking Volleyball. It was funny, but who takes the time to send an email to an ectomorph with mesomoprh tendencies to call them fat? The comments from Anonymous Volleyball playing people were quite right: I am ridiculous, and the reason I don't like it, is because I suck at it. I mentioned that in the post, but people still seemed angry. I suppose that's another reason why volleyball could suck: volleyball players not reading. I realize, almost two years after that post (which had 15 views today), that I was basically trying to write about Volleyball the way Andy Griffith discussed football.

It's cool to see that more Russians than Brazillians have stumbled onto this blog. That 14% of people who have been to Spartan use Macs. And that I am interested in this makes me feel very out of touch as I know this discovery is akin to currently "digging" a DJ Shadow album that came out in 1999. In a sense, I am more Andy Griffith than I ever thought I would be.

And so, while I look at the masturbatory Blogger Stats and stare at the bright colours and flashy things, here's some Andy Griffith discussing football. Spartan will be making its way back to Andy Griffith terrain over the next little while since that seems to be what makes strangers come to this thing. Though perhaps, I was always here:

February 2, 2011

Snow Day 2011: a Snow Day Retrospective

Every ten years, I get a snow day. Perhaps I only remember two.

The first was in North Bay in 1991. North Bay will always seem much colder than any other place I've ever lived, and my memory of the snow was that one morning it piled up 6 feet high at our doorstep. Perhaps that's relative since I had probably just cracked 5 feet in height. The highlight of that day was filling garbage bags with snow and using them as sleds down the driveway. It was all very folk art of us. We couldn't have imagined that something like the internet would be around some day, and I am positive that garbage bags were made a lot stronger 20 years ago when it didn't matter as much what went into landfills. By 2 in the afternoon, we were probably in the basement watching Jenny Jones and that was as perfect a day as a slow-to-develop-preteen-would-need until a few months later when someone introduced me to chewing tobacco and slow dancing.


In 2006, I heard this song over 200 times and went ten months without seeing snow.

My second snow day was in Vancouver, probably 2001. Vancouverites are like Americans when it snows: the city shuts down emotionally, people become "shocked" by the mere existence of cold precipitation that doesn't land on Whistler, and everyone starts driving like a raccoon in a live-action kids movie would, especially if there wasn't another raccoon working the pedals. As I was part of the workforce in '01, slinging vitamins for a company owned by the cult of Jehovah's Witness, this snow day was less about exploration, and likely turned into an excuse to drink on a Wednesday afternoon. Jenny Jones was still on TV, so I probably watched it. The best part of this snow day was that by noon, the snow had melted and I actually saw grass. The Vancouver snow day was like a Sphinx riddle: what acts like an osteoporotic ex-tennis pro in the morning and actually plays tennis by mid-afternoon? Or something.


In 2010 Captain Beefheart died, and it snowed all day.

That's it. Until 2021,
SnowDayve.