Misc Commentary For 11/08/04

08 Nov, 2004 by John Hawkins

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— Hey, it sounds like that old monster Arafat is going to get about the most appropriate resting place for his corpse outside of a pig pen….

“Unkempt, ankle deep in rubbish and the air thick with flies from the stinking market next door, the Arafat family plot could not be a more inauspicious burial place for the icon of Palestinian nationhood.

…Hidden behind a cement wall and accessible through a solitary white, metal door encrusted with mud, nothing could be less imposing or more humiliating for a man who is now unlikely to achieve his dream of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.”

That sounds oddly appropriate for an Arafat family plot doesn’t it? “(A)nkle deep in rubbish and the air thick with flies from the stinking market next door….” Few people on earth deserve to be buried somewhere like that more than a terrorist like Arafat…

— To all of the soldiers, Iraqi and America, fighting to clean out Fallujah in operation Phantom Fury: We’re rooting for you to put the bad guys in bodybags and make it out OK. Good luck and godspeed guys…

— My advertising started to peter out right before the election and it’s even slower now. So far this month, I’ve sold exactly 1 ad. According to The Wall Street Journal I am not alone.

On the other hand, a lot of blogs are apparently seeing huge drops in traffic while — at least so far — I’m holding a fairly large chunk of the people who started reading the blog over the last few months. Roughly three months ago, I think I was doing around 6500 people a day M-F. So far, I seem to be holding at 9,000-10,000 sets of eyeballs post-election 2004. And my philosophy is if you get the eyeballs, the money will eventually follow. And this quote by Henry Copeland from Blogads in the WSJ article also is keeping me optimistic about starting to make some serious money by the end of 2005….

“Mr. Copeland said that political advertising will recover, and blogs about other topics will expand much in the way the presidential campaign spurred visits to the partisan sites. “I think we’ll have explosions in other areas,” he said. He notes that even in the last couple of months, advertising in other categories has grown more quickly than the political area, and said overall business will be up 100-fold this year.”

— On a side note, roughly a decade ago, when I was co-editing a print zine called “Fubar” in the Charlotte area, it cost us — if I remember correctly — about $800 for a 10,000 copy run. Those 10,000 copies? That was two months worth of “free” zines (we — I should say my partner Adam — sold ads to pay for it).

But, today? I can have 9,000-10,000 people reading my blog, M-F, and say another 6,000 or so a day over the week-end and you know what it costs me? $20 a month for hosting. Ain’t technology grand?

— Here’s an interesting little factoid to keep on hand for all the leftists who claim only uneducated people vote Republican…

“People with postgraduate degrees went for Kerry 47% to 53%. However, those with undergraduate degrees went for Bush 58% for 42%, and those with some college went for the president 56% to 44%. when we get to those with a high-school education or less, they went for Kerry 54% to 46%.

— “A suspected bomb blew the front door off a Muslim elementary school in a southern Dutch town on Monday, days after a suspected Muslim radical allegedly killed a Dutch filmmaker, police said. No injuries were reported.”

There is no excuse, absolutely none, for trying to bomb an elementary school. The people responsible for that should be hung from the highest trees in Amsterdam…