in lieu of Search Engine Shenanigans and scantily-clad photoshop jobs of the madame who is secretary of state, i thought i’d share with you some of the ‘usernames’ or subject titles that currently show up in my Akismet spam queue. it really makes you wonder what people are thinking…

• patch perfect ~ obviously, they didn’t watch ‘Patch Adams’ in its entirety
• kcfd cyjokv ~ you know, i think i trademarked that one after a particularly long weekend of drinking back in my college days. i may have to sue for plagiarism!
• free cash casinos ~ yeah….right.
• christian song lyrics and tabs ~ absolutely disgusting!
• thank you notes for interviews ~ which oddly links to one of the ubiquitous online casinos. whatever!
• DelaUtept ~ cautions us: “a long ago for you was not much interesting found for you on otherwhirled.wordpress.com I advise to call on my resource on a fight against such spam spam to fasts of vstrech’ in ether if I to whom both may need or I in icq” ~ well, isn’t THAT special?
• analiwx ~ has cheap viagra for us. how thoughtful!
• birthday party clown detroit michigan ~ i suppose that might have been fun, but the clown forgot to even include a link!
• home remedies for nail fungus ~ these people really are quite helpful, aren’t they?
• find rockhopper on club penguin ~ it begins to sound like an old Infocom game…
• nez perce corn husk bag ~ i always wanted one of those!
• how to drive a golfball ~ Step 1. Make yourself really, really small.
• furniture exposed to tear gas ~ bean-bag chairs with post traumatic stress disorder. like new!
• realty in west mobile alabama ~ you know you’re a redneck if you can replace all four tires on your ’67 Chevy with the ones on your house!

sorry, i didn’t feel like doing photos this morning…maybe later.

(oh….me so punny!)

well, it’s Sunday morning, and i’m trying to get into the proper mood to start off a youth referee recertification class (i’m an instructor as well as a state-level referee), play in a co-ed game myself, then come back to the class and help grade recert tests. i enjoy all of the above, but i hate having to split it up like that. that’s the second time this summer i’ve had to go play in the middle of a class. i’ll come back, start grading tests, and conversation regarding what the proper answer to certain questions should have been gets distracted by ‘did you win?’, ‘how many goals did they score on your ancient ass?’, etc. kids. ya can’t live with ‘em, and ya can’t leave ‘em locked in the trunk.

anywho….

i’ve been having a good bit of fun watching the ClustrMap thing change over the past week. when i first put it up, it only caught the last 45 visitors to the otherwhirled that day. after that, it started collecting ‘real’ data. i do wish there was a way i could keep it from recognizing my own IP address, but it doesn’t seem configurable in that regard even were i to pay them actual money. anyway, as i inferred before, the question of where my visitors live intrigues me in the same way that general question does when i’m out refereeing at a soccer tournament somewhere. while most of our life-connections with each other are tenuous and temporary, they are nevertheless typically far more diverse than we realize, and our sphere of influence is frequently much greater than we tend to consider. as a referee, that little nugget of information helps to keep me more focused and balanced each game. as a blogger…well…i can hope that my little blog here helps make it clear to others around the world that not all Americans appreciate what our current administration is doing in the world at large.

case in point, the map below. looking at it, i realize that ‘mah tendency ta rite an’ spel lahk tha preznit talks’ (and likely spells himself) probably makes much of this site completely untranslatable for persons who speak other languages and/or don’t speak English very well, and i’m honestly sorry about that. with the number of beyond-the-USA visitors to the otherwhirled, i’ll consider adding ‘real’ English versions of my dialectical snark, but to be honest, the snark is very much equal portions of the way it’s written and what it says. i’ll churn on that for a few days anyway.

at the risk of sounding like a software evangelist, i am obviously enjoying Clustrmaps, and would recommend adding it to your own blog if you blog. it’s a relatively harmless, and certainly enlightening little tool. in my case, it reminds me that i should spread out the snark to include more globally-centric things. i’m by no means anti-American (for those who don’t know, i’m a Veteran of both Panama and the Gulf War), and most certainly the actions of the current administraion offend me on several levels ranging from the political to the military to the functional. but that’s not all that i’m about by any means. it looks like i’m going to have to start snarking world news a little more diligently; then we’ll see if my beyond-the-USA numbers increase or decrease!

(note how i tactfully didn’t say ‘foreign’ numbers? imho, there are no ‘foreigners’ on the Internet!)

it would appear that people who visit the Otherwhirled come from all over the world. i am a little awed by that.

i started using Clustrmaps on a whim after i came across it at Iron Skunk. i’ve been curious, of course, to see where my visitors come from, but like Skunk, this would not have been something i would have done even a year ago. but i guess IP-sniffing has become so blasé over the years that it makes something like this not only fun, but permissible.

unlike WordPress’s statistics, Clustrmaps doesn’t ignore my own visits to the blog itself to check comments or to the blog admin utility. therefore, i, and possibly a few other people, constitute the big dot over the northern plains. i’m trying to figure out which dots are the ones who keep searching for nude photos of Condoleezza Rice, but personally, i’m guessing it’s the dot that looks like it’s right around D.C. According to my WordPress logs, though, it’s probably most of you! hah!

of course, the map makes it painfully obvious that i don’t have THAT many visitors, and that my photo-snarking isn’t nearly as popular as actual, responsible discourse151;especially on important political matters. but i’m pleased nonetheless with such a wide diversity of visitors. thank you all for coming by, and many happy returns!

….other than this one, anyway….

today is one of those “drive three hours for a four hour meeting” days.

in the meantime, feel free to visit the fine folks in the blogrolls on the right.

~enjoy!~