Blog: Post #400

TORONTO, ONTARIO - When I reached blog post #200 back in February, I vaguely promised to repeat a look at lessons learned after another two hundred posts. Blogger.com has kindly reminded me that this is post #400, but I'm afraid I don't have nearly as many interesting things to say this time.

One of the lessons that I appeared to have learned in February has proven not to be true. I actually wrote out the band name Barenaked Ladies in this post and it was not spammed. Maybe the spammers aren't searching for the band's name since Steven Page left the band?

Blogger.com has informed me that I have a mere three formal followers of this blog, and I have no idea who two of you are. Neither is following a terribly long list of blogs, so both of you seem to be genuinely interested in something that I had to say (about exactly what I have no idea). Apparently it is rare in cyberspace to even know one of your followers, so I suppose I should feel fortunate to know any of you in real life.

There are various indications that even though informal followers are out there, the vast majority of the readership has searched for a specific topic and reads only one post, sometimes even leaving a comment months after the post was made (note the August comment on this February post). Some posts have risen fairly high in Google searches (witness a search for "UP conductor Reed Jackson" showing this recent memorial post as #5), so I suppose this phenomenon is not surprising.

A consequence of the one-post readership is that I'm not inclined to split this blog into different topic-based blogs as the technorati recommend. While I'm sure I have topic-based readers, the title line is for you. If you don't want to read my political and economic posts, or my railroad-related posts, just watch the first world in the title of the post and you'll continue to know whether to skip a given post.

Despite my lack of things to say in this post, I'm still looking at a list of post ideas that I haven't done yet, and I've proven in the past two months that I can keep posting even after working a full day, so this blog will continue at least to its first anniversary, now just weeks away.

Music: BNL as a Spiritual Band

BNL performed at the CBC's Sounds of the Season fundraiser in Toronto, Ontario on 5-December-2008

TORONTO, ONTARIO - On Wednesday, BNL founders Ed Robertson and Steven Page announced that lead singer Page would be leaving the band to pursue a solo career and perhaps acting, and the band would continue without him. In light of the rough year that the band has had, the news could not be called a complete surprise, but the announcement still was widely reported throughout Canada. The band, known for its playful lyrics and performances, remains clearly beloved in its native land.

Like many North Americans, I was first introduced to BNL in 1997 as their hit "The Old Apartment" rose in the charts. Their songs have made a significant contribution to my life, with two songs ("Pinch Me" and "It's All Been Done") in my my lifetime top 25, a feat matched only by Billy Joel.

What drew me so strongly to the band was not their playfulness, though, but the fact that many of their lyrics seem to be straight out of the "spiritual world", which is rare in popular music. As discussed here before, the "spiritual world" is one of four identified worlds in the Meridian Flexibility System, focused on energy, harmony with the world, prone to suffering, and with a "timeless" perspective (as opposed to future, past, or present-focused). The vast majority of popular music comes from the "emotional" world, though I have highlighted at least one artist from the "physical" world.

Perhaps the most obvious example comes from the song "It's All Been Done". The very title implies that life is just repeating itself. The group sings:

I knew you before the west was won
And I heard you say the past
was much more fun
You go your way, I go mine
But I'll see you next time

and

Alone and bored on a thirtieth-century night
Will I see you on The Price Is Right?

Could lyrics possibly be more "timeless"?

Yet, just about every BNL song has at least one "spiritual" element. "If I Had A 1,000,000 Dollars" has this line:

If I had a 1,000,000
We wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner
(But we would!)

Most types would give up macaroni and cheese (that's Kraft dinner if you're not Canadian) given a chance; only those with a suffering element of the "spiritual" would continue to delight in it.

Even the hit "One Week" which on the surface seems like a present-focused "physical" number has a spiritual line:

Five days since I laughed at you and said
"You just did just what I thought you were gonna do"

Is that not be straight out of the "pericardium" (a "spiritual" type) playbook of wisdom and laughing at self-destructive behavior?

There also seems to be a real theme of having a "physical"-type partner to deal with, the expected partner of a "spiritual" type, running not only through "One Week" but many BNL songs. Take this passage from "Call and Answer":

But I'm warning you, don't ever do
Those crazy, messed up things that you do
If you ever do
I promise you I'll be the first to crucify you

"Crazy, messed up" is a common description of "physicals" by "spirituals"--and judging them is a common "spiritual" practice.

The apparently-bad news at BNL could a boon for those enjoying "spiritual" lyrics. Both BNL and Page could separately now create such songs with such themes; this seemed to happen with Page's previous side venture, The Vanity Project in 2005. I look forward to more lyrics like this low-energy gem from "Pinch Me":

I could leave but I'll just stay
All my stuff's here anyway.

Blog: Lessons from the First 200 Posts

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The blogger software has been nice enough to inform me that this is the 200th post to this blog. Amongst other things, this means that I have spent approximately 200 hours writing at a computer for public consumption since 8-September-2008.

So what have I learned in the past five months or so?

* Most new readers to the blog are attracted because they are using RSS feeds for the keywords that a given blog entry cites. While I have made no effort to track reader behavior, I suspect most people read at most the given entry that came up via RSS, discover that this blog is varied in topic, and never return unless their key word comes up again.

* A surprising number of people have RSS feeds for their own names, and actually read at least one entry in this blog as a result of those feeds. Undoubtedly, there have been people cited in this blog that have read at least that entry without my ever knowing it, while others have posted comments or took other actions that caused me to find out. The message here: If you want to reach a public figure, write about them in a blog. They just might read it!

* If one writes about the band sometimes known as BNL, but using the full form of their name, it will attract spam. Furthermore, it won't just be run-of-the-mill spam, but really explicit spam of a sexual nature. So, it's best just to refer to them as BNL.

* Conservatives (that would be a lower case "c" were it not at the beginning of the sentence) are far more organized than liberals in responding to material on blogs. Look back at the few political comments that have been made on this blog. Every single one has come from a clearly conservative viewpoint (the only possible exception would be the comments on rank-order voting, which while hard to place exactly on the political spectrum, were probably to the left of my perspective--that was a better example of a RSS feed for a topic again more than political standpoint). I have criticized liberals, in particular the Liberal Party in Canada, and not one comment has resulted. This was not a particular surprise, but it was interesting to see this impression of the blogosphere confirmed.

* It's hard to predict what kinds of posts will get a positive response. Some, like the recent post on modern art, felt like they would get a positive response when written. Yet, some posts that I did essentially on a lark, like Glitch's razor and From Chemical Statistics drew rather surprising levels of responses both privately and publicly. On the other hand, I never received a direct response to Help with the Best Music of 2008, which I thought would at least draw some of my friends into private e-mails.

I still have nine topics back-logged on my scratch pad, so I think I'll keep writing on most days. We'll see what I learn in the next 200 posts.