Thursday, February 16, 2023

Early Stage Demen -- What's that called again?

Lately, Youtube's been shoving videos under my nose about how to tell if you're in the early stages of Dementia. I recently stopped worrying about early-onset Alzheimers (at my age, it won't be early), and now this. Let me say plainly: if I'm suffering from dementia, I want to be the last to know.

Now that I'm fully retired, I started posting here (after a long break) to keep my mind engaged with -- if not married to -- the thought process. Now I've noticed a feature on the Blogger dashboard called Stats. I wondered, what is this "Stats" thing and do they charge for it? Out of curiosity, I clicked on the "Stats" link and, to my surprise, got a page with -- stats.

There were some page views, which is unsurprising (I do visit my own blog from time to time). Then I noticed a recent interest in posts from the 2008 election. Now, not even I am interested in my thoughts on the 2008 election -- I was barely interested in my "thoughts" in 2008. So I suspect it's either 1) a graduate student analyzing "3Chan" rants (the predecessor to 4Chan) or 2) an FBI informant building a case. How to tell the difference? I'm thinking I'll sell a yearly subscription. The person who makes the purchase is the informant.

I should mention that in the post, "Doom for Democrats?" I speculate on the identity of the Phlegmatic Endtimer, Spengler, subsequently revealed as David Goldman. I sometimes think he is wrong-headed in his pronouncements but always with strong arguments to support his wrong-headedness. Some of his musings can be found here.

I wish I had hit the "stats" button earlier. At the start, I put some fiction on the blog as backup storage and later returned the pages to draft when I reread them and felt embarrassed. Now I see some of those stories got hundreds of page views during the time they were up.

Then there's the interesting case of Ask not for whom dat Canary croaks, it croaks for you!  The first seven years it got the expected couple of views. Then, all of a sudden, it got well over six hundred. Could it have been Russian bots?

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