Weekly Roundup for July 24th through 30th, 2011

This past week maintained the pace set the week before, when I posted 12 entries, readers made five comments, and the blog received 783 page views. Last week, I again wrote 12 entries, readers left four comments, one of which was spam, and the blog had 753 page views, more than 100 a day. This past week also saw the first time the blog exceeded 4,000 page views in a month, which happened late Friday. The month ended with 4,181 hits, a record. The stats are already looking good for this week, as readers left six comments, none of which were spam, and the 114 hits for today are well above last Sunday's 65. If this is the new normal, then I'm happy.




This was the last full week of Swim posts and most of my posts fit this theme one way or another, beginning with the previous Weekly Roundup in which I summarized all the previous week's Swim posts. The real Swim posts began with the second post of last Sunday, when I began covering the story of Raquel Nelson in A petition against the criminalization of walking, the most popular post of the week with 128 views. I followed up with Update on petition to decriminalize walking and wrapped up Raquel's story, for this week at least, in Her day in court, in which I also covered the conclusion of Julie Bass's legal journey.

Swimming against the tide of politics was the theme of many of the rest of the week's postings as well, beginning with I haven't forgotten about Troy's library, in which I revisited the struggle to keep local libraries open. The election for the millage will be the day after tomorrow. Look for a post about it. The swim against ignorance continued in Why do Tea Partiers hate high-speed rail?--a post inspired by a reaction to a story covered in Silly Sustainability Saturday: Carmageddon, Tea Partiers against manatees, and Butterbeer from a few weeks ago. This same story made another cameo in Silly Sustainability Saturday: The Onion, more manatees, heat wave denial, and a poem in which a U.S. Representative from Florida actually took their conspiracy theory seriously. If it weren't for the fact that the Tea Partiers are the epitome of what Kunstler calls "corn-pone fascists" who are standing in the way of sustainable solutions, I'd just type "LOL Teabaggers" and be done with them.

I didn't only document other people's attempts to swim against the political and cultural currents. I got up on my virtual soapbox myself. In What motivates Americans to act, I expressed my cynicism about America's screwed up priorities. For further commentary on this subject, read the LiveJournal version of this entry in which I explained why the NFL lockout had been resolved but the debt ceiling hostage crisis so far hasn't. I became a more idealistic in Allow me this rant on an anti-tax meme. I despaired in We could have had the Moon, instead we get Afghanistan. By this morning I was getting a bit punchy, as you can see in Debt Ceiling Cat, which will be in the next weekly roundup.

Of course, I also had the linkspams. This week, I posted only two of them, Sustainability news from Michigan's research universities for the week ending July 23, 2011 and Sustainability news from midwestern research universities for the week ending July 23, 2011. There were articles left over, which I'll collect into another sustainablity in archeology post, probably along with another CoDominion post and a leftovers post. That's in addition to the two linkspams of material I already have saved in another file. Hey, I'm an environmentalist, I recycle.

If you noticed, the previous weekly roundup didn't include a back-catalog champion. That's not the case this week, as Portland is watching "The End of Suburbia" cracked the weekly top ten with 14 page views. It also ended up as one of the top ten posts for July with 47 hits.

By the way, next month's theme for Nablopomo is Fiction. I'm participating. Here's the badge.




More on this theme beginning tomorrow, which will be in a few minutes. See you then!