"Anomaly Detected" reports Google Analytics. It seems Google expected 9 visitors to Wriphe.com on Friday, and I got 38. Can I account for that difference? No. Maybe a whole bunch of people tuned in to read my take on What's New Pussycat? Come to think of it, maybe some 21st-century surveillance AI flagged me for putting the terms "student bodies," "having wonderful crime," and "murderers among us" in the same blog post. If so, whoops, I did it again.

I don't look at the site analytics often, and I would have thought that 38 was a huge aberration. (According to my phone, I literally only ever communicate with about a dozen people, and that includes my dogs' vet and "friend" Keith who said he was going to buy us tickets for today's Dolphins vs Falcons game in Atlanta then didn't and threw a party without inviting me instead. Not that I'm bitter. At least now I don't have to spend time and money on the Dolphins. So thanks, Keith! What a pal!) But looking at the year-to-date snapshots, 38 appears not quite so deviant. It looks very much like I commonly have over 20 visitors a day in 2025. I'm sure I have no idea who most of you are or why you would be interested in any of my pretentious whining about football or my so-called "friends," but you're welcome here

In fact, I had 345 visitors on August 17. I would assume that was the leading edge of a Denial of Service attack, although the day before I did post about my family's Scrabble history, so maybe that showed up in some Google News feeds, and I caught some stray boardgame fan lookie loos by accident. To those people I offer my sincerest apology (13 points).

Huh. Now that I really walk though the dashboard, I find I am getting a surprising amount of traffic (14% of all site hits) from China. To the best of my knowledge, I don't know anyone in China, so that does seem a bit weird. I don't think that I post a bunch about anything Chinese, but a quick search does reveal 32 posts matching the word "China." There are not quite 3000 posts in the history of this site, so that's a healthy 1%. Disproportionate to the number of hits, sure, but also more than I would have expected. In any case, ni hao to my China people!

The real question is whether any of these analytics serve any purpose. I think the answer is no, at least in regards to Wriphe.com. As you probably know if you're reading this, I don't tailor my blog posts to anyone's interests but my own, which is probably why Google thought I should have only 9 visitors. Seems to me that's still 9 more visitors than I deserve. More often than not, I wonder why I bother posting anything at all, and it's rewarding to know that at least 9 of you are paying attention. Or at least clicking through to see if I'm a murderer. Even if you're all just web crawling spiders, thanks for dropping by.

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I was recently lamenting the fact that I used to have a cryptogram app on my old phone that let me pass the time in waiting rooms. So I did what anyone would do and re-coded the quotes that I put at the top of the blog as interactable cryptograms. Play here.

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Fifteen years ago, the top ten keywords at Wriphe.com were "comic books," "football," "news," "holidays," "batman," "superman," "movies," "television," "wriphe.com," and "uga" (which at some point in the past decade I changed to "georgia" because I now use Uga exclusively to refer to the UGA Bulldog mascot).

As of today, the top ten keywords are "movies," "comic strip," "poodle strip," "walter," "poodles," "football," "comic books," "news," "holidays," and "havanese strip."

The five constants there are "comic books," "football," "holidays," "movies," and "news."

I don't know what that means, if anything. I just thought I'd point it out.

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Captain D's is currently running an ad campaign that should be considered a war crime. When my television starts chanting "Fish D'Lish," I have to drive for the remote's mute button before the repetition drives me mad (or madder than I already am, anyway).

Once upon a time, I heard Stephen Colbert suggest that the best way to kill an earworm is to sing a shorter earworm that "cannot loop." His example was "by Mennen" as sung at the end of Speed Stick commercials. John Oliver suggested the "Ricola" yodel, and that's the one that usually works for me. I've been singing "Ricola" a lot lately.

On a marginally related note, I've recently been playing with the Talkback accessibility option on my phone. Theoretically, I could use it to control my phone hands free, but I've been using it to read Wikipedia articles out loud while I walk the dogs. Today I listened to the story of the Second Peloponnesian War. I found it amusing to hear my phone insist on calling the Persian king "Xerxes Eye."

That led me to wonder what Talkback's narrator would call this website, which has a made-up name I brainstormed on a napkin in my first apartment in Athens. Everyone seems to get it wrong on the first try. To my surprise, the phone handled "wriphe" perfectly. (For the record, it's pronounced like "rife," which was Merriam-Webster.com's Word of the Day on Sunday, and I'm going to have to steal their explanation to be another tagline for this site: "Rife Wriphe usually describes things that are very common and often—though not always—bad or unpleasant.")

So of course you know what I tested Talkback on next. Hint: It rhymes with "dish o'fish." What can I say? Advertising works.

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Google has kindly informed me that Wriphe.com has been having a problem with certain pages "without user-selected canonical" resolution. That's a fancy way of saying that you can get to the same content multiple ways, and Google's bots can't figure which one is the "correct" one.

I thought I had this problem fixed before, but my server did migrate my host not too long ago, and it's not unheard of for files to fail to transfer correctly. (I swear you get even one 1 swapped with one 0 and everything goes haywire!)

After a bit of re-coding, I think I have it fixed again, so hopefully everything is now resolving "canonically." What a good thing there was nothing else happening in the world to distract me during this difficult time!

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When an old man dies, a library is burned with him.

I occasionally worry about what will happen to this blog when I'm no longer alive or otherwise capable of maintaining it. No one owns anything in the virtual realm, and all sites (and all the knowledge they contain) evaporate like mist as soon as they are no longer profitable enough to maintain the energy cost of their digital existence. Since I have selfishly chosen not to have any children of my own that I can emotionally manipulate into keeping Wriphe.com alive in perpetuity, I probably need to accept the fact that once I'm gone, any evidence that I wasted so much time at a computer keyboard will be gone, too.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world really miss? Is the minutia evidence of my life really worth preserving? To answer that question, I climbed a mountain and asked a wizened sage... no, just kidding. I wrote a script that sorted and counted all 550,000 words I've recorded in the past 21 years to see if they gave me any indication of the site's value. (Note that my quick-and-dirty script returned many character strings you won't find in a dictionary, like movie titles, odd proper names, web addresses, and "g-g-ghost.")

The most common word at Wriphe.com: the

No great insight there. The is the most common word in the English language, which is no big surprise considering that it is the only definite article in the whole darn language. According to Wikipedia, it accounts for "seven percent of all printed English-language words." For comparison, it currently accounts for only about 5% of Wriphe.com. Heck, all first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my) combined make up only 3% of Wriphe.com! I guess I don't talk about myself enough.

After stripping out the top 50 most common English words (according to the same Wikipedia source), I get the following list:

1. my (3,110 occurrences)
2. it's (2,045)
3. about (1,847)
4. like (1,840)
5. me (1,769)

Ok, fine. Maybe I do talk about myself enough. Yeah, nobody in the future is going to need all of that.

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Eleven years ago, "friend" Keith predicted that my then-new DC Bullet tire cover would outlast the Jeep. I'm happy to report that he was wrong.

The Jeep is still going strong, and it's time to unveil this decade's tire cover!

Yeah, it's still black and white and red all over. When you find a color scheme that works, why change it?

As for that new url, try it yourself: wriphe.com/poodles

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For reasons I won't go into (mainly: vanity), I've recently been re-reading old blog posts. What stands out the most to me is not how damn clever I am (I already knew that) but how I have a real problem typing the word "it's" when I mean "its" and vice versa.

For the record, "its" (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of the traditional gender-neutral singular pronoun, used to demonstrate ownership, as in:

The battle station is heavily shielded and carries a firepower greater than half the star fleet. Its defenses are designed around a direct large-scale assault.

Meanwhile, "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of the unpossessive, laissez-faire "it" and the present tense third-person singular being verb "is," as in:

The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port.

As you can see, despite the its/it's pair being one of the most common confusions in the world of English grammar, I obviously know they're two different words, and I know how they should be used in a sentence (and I've known ever since Star Wars). So why do I so often type one when I mean the other? Is it a birth defect? A mental illness? Keyboard gremlins? I wish I had a better answer than "I'm too lazy to proofread my own posts," but here we are.

Now let's blow this thing and go home.

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My obsession with Captain Kirk's U.S.S. Enterprise continues unabated.

If you're a Star Trek fan who has a large monitor and a mouse with a scroll wheel (or keyboard with PgUp, PdgDn buttons), you might enjoy this page I made for my own amusement: wriphe.com/constitution-class/

And if you're not a Star Trek fan, what's wrong with you?

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Questions from Hannah, part 2:

Why do you like cemeteries so much?

Because they are awesome. You can keep your forests and "grand" canyons. I'll take a cemetery any day.

Cemeteries are a reminder that the world wasn't built for me, that life only has the meaning we give it, that the journey is always more important than the destination. Memento mori!

When built right, the Victorian way, cemeteries are a delightful combination of storybook and park, usually filled with a bunch of spectacularly crafted art. As a bonus, most living people treat cemeteries with a serene reverence you don't find anywhere else, so cemeteries are simultaneously full of people and very quiet.

Truthfully, I think the idea of burying people in boxes in the ground is kind of ridiculous, but I love, love, love the stone monuments left above ground to mark their territory. If nothing else, those tombstones say "I was here," and that sort of yelling into the void of eternity speaks to me. What is a tombstone but a very succinct and enduring blog post?

And why do you call them cemeteries instead of graveyards?

Because that's what they are.

In the modern Western tradition, a graveyard is a type of cemetery that is on a church grounds while a cemetery is a community's common burial ground not necessarily connected to a specific church. For example, my town's local burial ground (established 1833) is officially Oak Hill Cemetery, though there are plenty of churches around here with their own much smaller graveyards. It's my experience that cemeteries are often more welcoming to visitors (and usually contain more delightfully ostentatious monuments) than graveyards, but I've been in plenty of delightful graveyards, too.

Personally, I can't say as I like the word "graveyard." A yard of graves sounds so very bleak, while there's almost something celebratory in a "cemetery." I like both of those much more than I like the euphemism "memorial park." The government should make you explicitly declare if you have a park full of corpses.

Looking at Online Etymology Dictionary, it would appear that both "graveyard" and "cemetery" have historically referred to more or less the same thing, so their use prior to the 19th century probably derives from whatever languages were spoken by a region's ancestors. And I suppose that maybe you live somewhere where "graveyard" has remained the preferred term, which is fine by me. Regional differences are fun!

You often mention the fact that you work at night and sleep through the morning; is your brain really more alert in the middle of the night?

I do think I do my best coding and most often find myself "in the zone" between 1 and 3AM, but I don't know if I would say that I am especially more alert in the darkness than I am in sunlight — I'm no vampire. I really like the late night because everyone else is asleep. For one thing, it's useful for my work: coding is easier without distractions, and it's easier to update websites, databases, and video game files when they aren't being as widely used. But I chose my occupation, not the other way around. I just like being the only person around. It's like the entire world becomes a cemetery, and you already know how I feel about that.

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