The Internet Is a Strange & Magical Place

An amusing aspect of having a character in one of your novels named after an historical figure is the number of hits your blog receives from school kids looking for information for a school report.

<Waves hand> This is not the Howard Carter you are looking for. </waves hand>

At least I deal with the mummy thing in the first chapter or two. I'm still having fun imagining the kinds of reports that sort of 'research' might generate. "Howard Carter discovered King Tut's tomb and then went on to defend the earth from an alien invasion, using an army of robots and a recipe for instant pudding."

I'm not a history teacher, but for my money, that should be an A+ paper.

Yes, I've been looking at my blog stats again. Yes, I'm blogging about blogging again.

I apologize. I'll go back to other stuff in the next post, I promise.

I used to ignore blog stats that Google coughed up for me (mostly because they made me sad) but then Blogger incorporated them into the actual site and it became a one-click thing. Which means that I've been forced to acknowledge that I'm no longer talking to myself.

It also provides endless amusements and quite a bit of head-scratching because it lists the search terms that got some of you here. My favorite search terms of this week are: "eschew your words carefully".  Now, that certainly sounds like me, though I don't recall saying it.

It almost lost out to "legal pen feathers law desk" which somehow got three people to my blog this week. How? I HAVE NO IDEA! But it's true.  And I'm happy to see you! Please leave a comment. I'd love to write more about these legal feather desk pens.

The internet is a strange and magical place.


Well, however you got here, welcome and well-met!

Please be aware of the following:

• Please comment and play along. At its best, a blog can be a conversation and create a sense of community. At its worst, a blog is someone shouting down a well.
• The name of the blog is in reference to my chronic and apparently unsolvable insomnia. I keep meaning to go back and chart the time stamps of my blog posts sometime, but I'm afraid it might force my family to finally do something about it and I hate sleeping pills.
• Some people have an inner child. Mine is afraid of the dark, so I like to let him out to run around in the light of day rather more often than most people. You should try it sometime, it's good for you.
• I am a bit of a nerd. If you don't notice that right away, go back and re-read a bit; you probably missed a Star Wars reference somewhere.
• If you don't find something funny, that's OK. Come back and re-read it at three am and you'll probably find it funnier. I certainly did.
• Nothing found herein should be construed as the entire view of the author or anyone else living, dead or existing in an indeterminate state caused by fluctuations in space and time.
• If you use anything I've written in a school paper, good luck to you. Don't blame me when your teacher docks you points for including that bit about Howard Carter inventing the Otter Pop Fusion Reactor.