Thursday is the new Tuesday

Oops! A thousand pardons! I got so carried away with posting about Freckles the Cow that I forgot to post any Tuesday ramblings this week. And it’s Thursday already. So these “Thoughts on Thursday” will have to serve, belatedly, as my “Tuesday ramblings #4” in disguise.

Here are two series of numbers. Can you guess what they represent?

A. 3,3,2,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,4,0

B. 8,6,2,1,7,5,7,3,2,3,5,8,2,4,6,4,2,5,7,2,4,4,3,5

I thought not. Well, don’t burst a capillary; I’ll tell you. Series A is the number of readers’ comments received on this blog on each of its first 24 posts. Series B is the number of readers’ comments received on this blog on the most recent 24 posts. Since the blog has been in existence for almost 11 months, I have calculated that at this rate my readership will equal that of the The New York Times in the year 802,701 A.D., which just happens to be when the Time Traveller from H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella, The Time Machine, will be discovering those nice Eloi and those nasty Morlocks. It is also when there will be absolutely nothing left that’s fit for The New York Times to print. If you’re not familiar with The Time Machine, here’s a link to the appropriate Wikipedia article, which includes a fascinating summary of the plot. If you’ve never read the book and you never intend to and if you did you would want to read it without being told the plot in advance, please refrain from clicking on the link to the Wikipedia article!

And now we go from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Mrs. Rhymeswithplague’s favorite blog, The Pioneer Woman, is written by a woman in Oklahoma who regularly channels (her word) both Lucille Ball and Ethel Merman. It is divided into sections called “Confessions,” “Cooking,” “Photography,” and “Home/Garden,” and the author commonly receives such staggering readers’ comment figures as 287, 418, and the like. On each post. It’s enough to make me want to (pick one):

(a) cry,
(b) give up altogether,
(c) puke,
(d) try even harder,
(e) all of the above.

The correct answer, class, is (e), although I hasten to add that my choices don’t suggest themselves all at the same time. Usually. So if you just have to go see what The Pioneer Woman's blog is like, I have conveniently hidden, I mean included, a link to it somewhere earlier in this paragraph, and I will try to understand.

I would also like to tell you that I intend to keep plugging away, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after...well, you get the picture, until I’m old and gray. That’s what I would like to tell you, but unfortunately I’m already old and gray.

As they say, it’s the thought that counts.