The Daily Babble

Surprises

Got a nondescript looking envelope in the mail, almost threw it out, though the lack of any information on the outside made me curious (for as we all know, CHECK ENCLOSED on the outside only announces a scam, and I got one of those this week, too.) But when I opened this anonymous looking envelope, it did contain a check--for over a hundred dollars.

So of course I read the accompanying material to see what the scam was--like I could cash the check as soon as I bought one of their 20 thousand dollar stadium-size TVs or something. But no. This was a real check, one I had actually earned. It was for the Google ads that have appeared on this blog, and several of my other ones, for years now. It's the first money I've ever seen from blogging. And it took a long time--so long that I stopped checking the account. I couldn't understand it anyway. But I gather that it all accumulated, until it passed a hundred bucks worth, the threshold for writing the check.

The ads pay because of traffic, or click-throughs, or something like that--lots of hits involved anyway. These blogs are not particularly successful in terms of numbers--this one is just now approaching 25,000 total hits, while Soul of Star Trek inches closer to 100,000. But it took years to get even those numbers. Still, it was a nice surprise--and came in handy less than 24 hours later when my fan belt broke as I was passing an auto repair shop. So the money's gone already, and I'm not yet done with repairs apparently.

Numbers aren't everything. I get nice comments at Soul of Star Trek, even a compliment on my Gojira essay, the occasional nice comment here, and even a complaint yesterday that I wasn't writing often enough.

As for that, I've just had a run of deadlines, pretty much done now, and besides the insecurity of steady (part-time) work not resuming for a couple of months, I do hope to pay more attention to my blog garden. This one I'm once again going to try to focus, maybe starting with better links. We'll see.

And now, the news.

Here are a couple of hopeful items to explore: Americans drove less in 2005 than they did the year before, according to a study--the first year-to-year drop in 25 years. Higher gas prices, aging population, are among the factors the study cites, though the linking to higher prices is disputed elsewhere. And...another study suggests that globally, deforestation may be slowing down, and cumulatively, regeneration is on the rise--meaning that instead of dropping steadily, forests may be increasing by 10%. Here's the BBC article, and here's an evaluation from Treehugger.com.


“How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?” Peter Jennings asked Henry Kissinger at a media-heavy dinner party, hosted by Barbara Walters, some years ago. Undeterred by the general embarrassment, he asked him again. I wonder when Don Rumsfeld will start getting that question over his soup?

What's really happening in Iraq? Steve Gilliard has a pretty simple explanation. It has the ring of truth, which to me means that I'll keep an eye out for confirmation.