2011: The year of sci-fi spam, Assyrian tearaways and sexy robot talk

Thanks to the incredibly garish, possibly seizure-inducing end of year report sent out to bloggers by WordPress, I know that the most viewed posts since the blog started a year ago are:

• 1 Beautiful Spam II
• 2 Fμckbird and Jim: James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle
• 3 The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Groping: Japanese Onomatopoeia
• 4 Smutty Letters of James Joyce: Stephen Hawking Version
• 5 Kids today… (in the Assyrian Empire, 2800 BC)

At first it may seem strange that a post about spam was more widely read than a bunch of pornographic letters by a famous author and full of search engine red flag obscenities, but the explanation is that a famous living author (William Gibson) linked to the spam post, and his thousands of followers did the rest.  Otherwise Fμckbird and Jim: James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle would be by far the most visited and linked page on the site, you dirty little brown-arsed blackguards. It’s funny that #4 is merely a suggestion that one has the aforementioned letters read out by speech synthesis software for comedic, de-sexying effect. You never know what’s going to tickle people. Unless you’re James Joyce, in which case the thing tickling people will probably be your fat purple mickey.

Actually, it’s always a pretty safe bet that anything sexual will get lots of hits. I mean… duh. Combine the words “groping” and “Japanese” and you’ve got blogging gold. I didn’t do it on purpose, though. I was just interested in the fact that the Japanese have onomatopoeia for everything, including (of course) groping.

The post at #5- evidence that “things ain’t what they used to be” miserablism is eternal- had an unexpected side effect: I don’t know why it’s so, but it was revealed to me that people are constantly searching for information about the Assyrian Empire. Obviously on the vastness of the internet somebody somewhere is bound to be looking for almost anything you can think of at any given moment, but nonetheless the steady stream of “Assyrian Empire” queries seems surprising to me.