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Doxos is doing so well that I earned a full penny from Google's Adsense last month. Clearly, I'm well down the path to fame and fortune. While February saw 130 unique visitors across 4 continents, March saw 345 visitors across every continent save Antarctica. The most popular essay was Why I'm not a Republican closely followed by How the Classical Idea of Justice Ought to Underly the Debate Over Victimless Crimes such as Prostitution. If the most popular essays are about Republicans and Prostitutes, I suppose that if I were interested entirely in increasing traffic, I'd make the next piece about Republican Prostitutes. Google is now driving almost half of my traffic. The funniest combination of search terms for the month was ``malatesta alcohol'' which evidently took someone to Yo-Yo Ma as a Philosopher King in an Ignorant City. Other than that, I could probably make a good guess on what term papers in philosophy classes are being written in which parts of which country based on the prevalence in a given week of particular search terms.
Most of Saturday I spent chipping paint off of a wall in the upstairs apartment. I had intended to only chip away the paint in a couple spots where there was water damage from the past. Turns out that the paint covered wall paper and once I started, I was obligated to finish. I should be more careful. My hand aches and burns. I'm none too gentle with a paint scraper it would seem. On the bright side, I got to show my eldest daughter how to properly cut and hang drywall. `Why are you teaching me this?'' she asks. I replied by telling her how much it would cost to get a repair guy out to do a small job. ``Why would anyone pay that much money for something they can do themselves that easily?'' was her next question. I left it to her to come up with an answer for that one. Late last week, I went down to the local branch of my library to pay off my fine. Once again I'm capable of checking items out of the library. I reserved a title for an essay I'm working on in the back of my mind. Unless I hear something that inspires me on the radio, I think that I'm about done picking the low hanging fruit. From here on out, it'll be hard work. Friday night and most of Saturday, my youngest daughter was busy with a local chess tournament. She ended up winning 3 of the 5 games she played so she didn't do well enough to get trophy. She also got beaten by a grandmaster during the pre-tournament exhibition. Since my wife accompanied her this left me with large swaths of time alone. I don't get such alone time very frequently. It was good. Sunday was my friend Kassia's birthday. We had her over for dinner for an impromptu birthday soiree of sorts. It was fun. Regrettably my soup didn't turn out as well as I would have liked. But the cake turned out quite well. Although some of the womenfolk complained about the lack of chocolate. Sunday was also almost a riot. I found myself acting as a substitute teacher for the fourth grade class at Sunday school again. The mission this week was to make hundreds of sacked lunches for one of the local food pantries. We had all of the classes lined up in assembly lie fashion. One class dropped in juice boxes. Another class dropped in an orange. I supervised the joint efforts of the fourth grade through high school aged kids making peanut butter sandwiches. It was chaos, total and utter chaos. And much fun was had by all. Update [2008-4-7 13:26:7 by lm]: Stanley Kurtz's review of Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East RTFO.
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