The Edge of Reason

Reviving an old practice, I'm going to look at how this blog has been performing in the past year, using statistics provided by Google Blogger based on Page Views. Interest in Harmless Drudgery is, to use a technical term that I haven't had to grapple with since my Nets&Comms days, bursty.

<autobiographical-note date-range="1984-2003">
In the very nearly 20 years I spent at DEC/Compaq/HP ... 

<bloody-capitalists>
(those skinflints were careful to get rid of me just before I clocked up my 20th year – when they would have had to fork out for a gold watch)
</bloody-capitalists> 

... I often met the term. A signal is bursty when it keeps changing from very busy to almost quiescent, from polygonum baldschuanicum ('mile-a-minute plant') to tumble-weed.
</autobiographical-note>

Some days it barely claws its way into double figures, but on other days it can run to several hundred. This 'burstiness' is ironed out to some extent to an average of 30-odd a day, but the monthly average can be pretty variable too:

Du côté de chez Knowles

I've been watching The Edge of Darkness (made in 1985, but repeated recently  on BBC 4) for the nth time (n = 3, I think – > 2 anyway). It's still very good (though not without flaws   –  notably the very clunky sketching of the eco-political background, by means of an extremely silly guest speaker (who appeared in the first ten minutes but never again). I imagine he may have had leather patches on his elbows, in common with most speakers in the Rent-an-Idealist-Boffin stables. And the inevitable and entirely gratuitous bit of hanky-panky with Zoe Wanamaker was buttock-clenchingly  pointless.

But for the most part it's good, and stands the test of time...

<recursive-tangent>
(which is more than can be said for the idiom 'it stands the test of time'. Why did I use it? Beats me.
</recursive-tangent>

. It deals with a detective (Bob Peck) investigating the death of his daughter and learning about her in the process (and finally coming to sympathize with her). Made in 1985, it is strangely reminiscent of – though obviously different, both in political background and sex of the main characters ...

<etymological-fallacy>
(the word protagonists sprang  guiltily to mind [and to my lasting shame and regret] , but I suppressed the urge. I try not to entertain the etymological fallacy – which decrees that words can only ever mean what their roots [etyma?] originally meant [eg decimation can only ever refer to a 10% cull] – but I find it hard, knowing an admittedly tiny amount about classical Greek tragedy [Greek O-level Best Before June 1968, but I have read at least one Euripide {sic}] to imagine a play with more than one protagonist. So I try to avoid kicking the hornets' nest. But an inventor whose prototype is a failure, and who designs and builds another should surely not feel constrained to call the second one a deuterotype.)
</etymological-fallacy>

... – the 1982 feature film Missing, which has Jack Lemon reprising (preprising?) the Bob Peck role of a politically naïve...

<etymological-fallacy take="2">
(and that's another thing, I don't insist on naïf for a man, although I'd probably use it if I ever had need of the phrase faux naïf, which I've managed without for the last seventy yea...(whoops))
</etymological-fallacy>

... bereaved father. I suppose there was something in the water in the '80s that encouraged the revisiting of this trope.

But, as good old Willy Wordsworth so eloquently put it, 'Up! Up! my friend and quit your books'.

I shall return.

b

Update 2023.06.02.10:50 – Added PS

PS And here he is. Bursty or what?  For the last week of May (except on 31st, when there were nearly 500) daily visits came to an average of about a dozen. In the first 1 and a bit days of June, they're just shy of 1200 (1198 at last count, but by the time I hit Publish who knows?). This is more than all but four of last year's totals for a full month.

But I'm missing the cricket...

Update 2023.06.10.20:10 – Added PPS

Curiouser and curiouser. The burst has continued: in the first ⅓ of June, visits to the blog have amounted to more than the total from January to May 2023:

HD Page Views in first half of 2023

Update 2023.06.15.14:30 – Added PPPS

Last time, honest. Now that the first half of June is nearly over, HD  Page View have outweighed the previous 6 months (Dec 2022-May 2023), and by close of business 'today' (I'm not sure when the day ends on the Internet; possibly 23'59" PST) it'll probably have included November 2023 as well: