Weekly Roundup for July 17th through 23rd, 2011

After a record-breaking week, things were bound to slow down and they did. I posted 12 entries, readers made five comments, and the blog received 783 page views, down from 14 posts, 13 comments, and 1577 page views last week. Even so, I count it as a good week, as it was on par with the week before with eleven posts, five comments, and 832 page views of the week before. If nothing else, page views remained well above the average of 560 per week for all of May and June. Besides, Saturday saw the 10,000th page view in this history of this blog and on July 20th the number of monthly page views exceeded 3,000 for the first time ever. People are reading me, so I'm happy.





Most of my posts counted as Swim posts this week, although they weren't quite the ones I had in mind this time last week. To begin with, I counted Weekly Roundup for July 10th through 16th, 2011 as a Swim post, as a good chunk of the opening described my swimming against the stream of spam that flows into any blog with traffic. Bloody Vikings! I continued pursuing the Swim angle in my followup to Silly Sustainability Saturday: Carmageddon, Tea Partiers against manatees, and Butterbeer, Cyclists, subway rider, and rollerblader all beat jet during Carmageddon involved the advocates of sustainable transportation as well as a blogger about California Highways swimming against the stream of conventional wisdom about traffic. I also included the peaceful yet entertaining cosplaying protesters of In Chile, superheroes dance against austerity as people swimming against the tide of austerity sweeping the planet.

In a way, the local stories I covered could also be considered swimming against the tide, sometimes unsuccessfully. The demise of Borders Books, which I wrote about in Borders Books 1971-2011 and The funeral for Borders Books begins chronicled the end of my favorite booksellers to remain in business after two decades of swimming against the tide of their competitors and their own poor business decisions. The same could be said about my coverage of the heat wave in both Hot enough for you? and Still hot enough for you?, which described how people, animals, and the power grid were trying to beat the heat and sometimes failing. Some attempts actually involved swimming pools, turning Swim from metaphor to reality.

Finally, even my compilations of sustainability news items could be considered Swim posts. I explicitly labeled Sustainability news from Michigan's research universities for the week ending July 16, 2011 and Sustainability news from midwestern research universities for the week ending July 16, 2011 as such because I was too tired to comment on each item and it was an effort even to post them. I didn't make that claim for Sustainability in unexpected places: archeology 2, but I didn't comment on the individual items there, either. The heat was getting to me, too.

On the other hand, I was able to make comments on both Science and society for the week ending July 16, 2011 and Silly Sustainability Saturday: Boobs and Haboobs. In the first, I voiced my frustration with people making pro-austerity and anti-sustainability decisions; I was the one swimming against the stream there. In the second, I pointed out how the people who are frustrating me are themselves swimming against reality. I have confidence that reality will win, eventually.

That's it for last week. As for this week, I already have at least one post a day planned. There are three nearly completed linkspams already saved to another file, as well as the notes for the same four Swim posts that I had on tap last week, along with an article about Detroit a reader posted on my Facebook wall that I've already promised to cover. That doesn't even cover anything else I might write about, such as Julie Bass's court date on Tuesday. As I keep writing, I don't have to worry about finding something to write about the rest of the month. Blogging about sustainability in metro Detroit means never running out of material!