Random stats after five months

By David McElroy · October 13, 2011

Since this site launched on May 13, we’ve now had visitors from 138 countries, which truly astounds me. I compiled a few stats about where everybody’s coming from and what they’re using to get here.

The 10 countries that are most heavily represented have been the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Finland and New Zealand. Just as an example, this is a map of the cities in the UK that have sent visitors.

The 10 most active U.S. states are Texas, California, New York, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. On the flip side the states with the fewest visits have been Vermont, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Hawaii, Delaware, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Rhode Island.

Windows is the most common operating system, of course, with 73.56 percent of you using the dominant computer platform. (That was lower than what I expected.) The Macintosh gets 14.09 percent of you here. The real surprise is how great a percentage are using mobile devices to read the site. 3.8 percent of my visitors are using iPhones, 2.75 percent are using iPads and 2.73 percent are using Android devices of some kind. Overall, there were 20 different operating systems represented, including gaming platforms and a couple of things I’d never heard of.

For those of us who remember when Internet Explorer had more than 90 percent of the browser market, the browser numbers are interesting. Firefox led the way with 32.82 percent, IE was next with 31.67 percent, Chrome was third with 15.17 and Safari was fourth with 13.58 percent, so there’s a lot of diversity among the browsers people are using to get here.

A lot has changed in five months, but things are just getting started. Thanks to everyone who’s been a part of a successful beginning. I appreciate you reading and I really hope you’ll always stick around. Also, here’s a special thanks to those who take the time to comment on the articles. Please keep contributing. I need you.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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