PETE TOWNSHEAD MADE ME WRITE THIS POST - REDUX

This is a slight edit on the orginial post, the new material is about ten paragraphs down, where I talk about Audie Murphy.

Who are you? OK, that gets the Pete Townshead reference out of the way. But it does touch on the topic of this post. Who are you? Why are you here? How did you get here? And no, none of these are philosophical questions of universal import, this blog is not that sophisticated. No, this is a much more insular post. Take those questions and apply them to this post: Who are you? Why are you here? How did you get here?

I have a couple of tools on this site that allows me to keep track of certain stats: How many people have visited in a day, what their locales are, even how they came to the site, how they were referred. Nobody panic: I have no way to find anybody's address, IP provider, personal e-mail etc. Well, even if I did, I would have no idea how to use such tools or any inclination to do so. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I respect other people's privacy to a fault; translation, I don't care to know you all that well. OK, so that is a bit disingenuous. I am very curious about who visits the site and why.

A lot of the people who read this blog are folks that Collette and I actually know, our friends and a lot of members of our two big crazy families. That is called a kind of captive audience and I am glad to have them. I also have regular readers from the online community that has developed around Screw Bronze . Collette and I are proud to be part of that particular community and I am happy when any of Elizabeth's readers visit here.

The Hairy Edge has been around long enough that the search engines are beginning to reference it. And that is very entertaining for me. I get a lot of people searching "hairy" Fair enough, that is right in the title of the blog. But some of the hairy things they search for ... well, this is the sexnet, I mean internet, after all. Hairy women. Apparently "Hairy Mary" is quite the popular young woman ... and no, I did not visit Hairy Mary, there are certain things I just do not need to see. I don't know why, but most of the "erotic" hairy searches are coming from the middle east. I have no idea why. It is just what Sitemeter shows me.

Then we have hairy searches you can lump into a sexual category from another perspective: Hairy men seeking other hairy men. Bears, specifically. This has nothing to do with the big furry critters that prowl along Springhaven Lodge .. ok, maybe it does, I don't ask what people's preferences may be.

"Old hairy mothers" was another search ... that I do not need to see either. There apparently is a band called The Hairy Edge .... really? I don't know what this phrase means to be honest, but I would not have associated music with it. There is a Hairy Edge Productions ... and it is not mine. There is an irony. I have a production company, my blog is called The Hairy Edge and my company is called something else.

Then there are the folks out there searching for answers about their hair growth. Fair enough. I have mentioned this in a few posts, I just hope no one was expecting answers cause really, let's face it, there are no answers on this site.

Dog parks are another big search; again, not surprising, I've written about dog parks several times. My post on dog park etiquette gets big responses. I wish I got more hits from the Toronto area because dog owners are still not picking up their dog poop and still walking away with Hayley's toys.

People out there are searching for Jeff Healy which pleases my heart because I will be a Jeff fan for life and although the man is gone, his music needs to be supported for a long time to come.

And Audie Murphy. My man Audie I have had serveral hits searching for Audie, one as recently as a full day after I originally filed this post. I have had several hits for Audie from the UK, which I find interesting. I think of Audie as an Amercian icon, mostly for his war exploits and today, to a far lesser degree, for his work in movies.

Some of the searches surprised me as they were connecting things that I may have mentioned only briefly in the blog. Like the old Raquel Welch western Hannie Caulder. Take a look at this post I wrote comparing the movies The Brave One and Death wish, you have to look pretty hard to see the Hannie Caulder reference but it is in there. The fact that somebody was searching for the movie, however, did inspire me to buy the movie on eBay. No, I haven't watched it yet. Like a lot of movies/books/music I enjoyed in my youth, I have a nagging suspicion that the actual product may not live up to the memory.

My post on whether or not I am disabled got a huge response, most of it thanks to a reference Elizabeth made at Screw Bronze. I am still getting hits from this search parameter which should be not too surprising, people are still disabled, and people still need to know how and why the world is viewing them in this context.

Besides search hits, the other thing my online tools show me is who is visiting, at least in terms of regions. Again, I can often match locales to people I know; Kingston area is my family, Parry Sound is Collette's family, Victoria is Elizabeth, Regina is Neal and a certain UK location is going to be Gaina.

But I have some regular visitors who I can not easily identify. I have a very dedicated regular reader from Mountain View, California ... who are you? Where do I know you from? I love the fact you are a regular but as always, my question would be ... why?? I have some regular viewers from Los Angeles and a couple more from the UK who I cannot identify. And Quebec. I'm big in Quebec .... perhaps not the same as the Tom Waits song "I'm Big in Japan" but there you go.

Obviously, I like knowing that people are actually reading this thing. Not an absolute requirement for me, I almost exclusively write just to appease the voices in my head. But hey, I am glad you are all out there. If you would care to drop a comment or even an email every now and then, that would be awesome. If you comment I will almost always try to respond, if only to thank you for commenting. I have no problem with anonymous comments, it is just nice to know that you are actually out there.

Incidently: I have a new gadget at the bottom of the post, called Following. Not sure I totally understand it but I guess it is a kind of way for you to suscribe and for me to follow you ... wow, that sounds really creepy but it is nothing of the sort. So the gadge allowed me to title this feature and of course, I called it Edge Heads. Are you an Edge Head? Do you think that is the most annoying thing you've ever read? Well .... I will accept that comment too.