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A mighty tasty Thanksgiving




That’s right good eatin’

November was turkey month. At least it is in most places in the US of A. Here in Richard Harter’s World it appears to be camel month. This november my Whole Stuffed Camel recipe got 7500 hits, almost all of them in the two days before Thanksgiving.

I dunno. People just have to learn. If you’re going to have whole stuffed camel for Thanksgiving you have to order your camel in advance.

Twinkle, twinkle, little windtower

South Dakota, at least in these parts, is an agricultural state. This is not because the land is so fertile and productive. Around here they practice dry land farming with an emphasis on dry. For the most part they farm and ranch because there isn’t anything else to do around here. We may run short on rain but we make up for it on wind, which brings me to windtowers.

Recently Florida Power and Light put in a wind farm about a dozen miles south of me. Don’t ask me what Florida P&L; is doing in South Dakota. The Evial Arluis has informed me that my fiction is surreal, as though “reality” weren’t quite as surreal in its own right.

The modern windtower is a wonder. You see this graceful white tower standing tall in the air with three fan blades turning lazily in the wind. It is hard to realize how big they are. I don’t have the numbers but each one is some hundreds of feet tall, and they weigh many, many tons. One of these monsters pumps out about a megawatt when the wind is blowing, and in these parts the wind almost always is blowing.

Like radio towers and other tall structures, these windtowers have to have beacon lights, little red lights that twinkle at night. So it is that when I drive home at night I am treated to a Christmas Tree Light horizon.

What was that about surreal?

Maxing Out

Some people worry about maxing out their credit cards. I worry about maxing out my web site hits. The good folks at Earthlink have given me eight chunks of web site space, each one having ten megabytes. For me that is a lot of space since I don’t have any media crap. Yay!

There is a catch though. Each of these chunks is limited to one gigabyte of traffic a month. That seems like a lot – after all that’s thirty-three megabytes a day. In November I maxed out on the 28th. Folks on turkey weekend just had to do without me. Here are the November numbers

Total Visitors: 52,261
Total Pageviews: 106,672
Total Hits: 209,131
Total Bytes Transferred: 1.05G

That’s 1866 visitors per day, and 7,468 hits per day. That’s just on the main site, cri. On Annex A I got an additional 4030 visitors who sopped up 427 megabytes.

My explanation for this popularity is simple. The youth of America, their bright young minds seeking wit and wisdom, eagerly searching for fonts of learning, quite naturally find their way to Richard Harter’s World, where said intellectual goodies are to be found in abundance. Why is it, though, that they all seem to head to the humor pages and the Darwin Awards?


This page was last updated December 1, 2003.
It was reformatted and moved May 15, 2006.

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