General

… are really creepy if you don’t know what’s really going on. I first saw a kid wearing them at a store a few weeks ago. The kid was walking, walking, walking, and then all of a sudden, he was just gliding along on his heels. And, of course, from my point of view, he was doing this on regular old shoes. Just gliding along, 10 feet, 15 feet… It was a really peculiar sight. Suffice to say, I didn’t know what they were. I just did some searching, though, and discovered that they’re called Heelys. You can see some videos of them in use here.

Strangeness.

The Hunger Site has been around since 1999. During the time it has been running, I haven’t “clicked” nearly enough. Why? Because I often have forgotten about the site. Yesterday I signed up to their newsletter to remedy this problem. (If you want to sign up for this [and you should], go to the main site, and then on the left side, click “Remember to click.”)

The way the site works is pretty simple. You go here, then click the big yellow button that says “HELP FEED THE HUNGRY.” The next step is, there is no next step. Your click, through the sponsors on the site, just provided a little over a cup of food to someone who needs it. It’s not a hoax, either; it’s totally legit, and if you want, you can read up on it at Snopes.

I decided to post about this after I took a look at the results page, which shows how many clicks there have been on each day, how much food the clicks produced, etc. For April 16th and 17th, for example, there were around 133,000 clicks for each day. While that’s great and it produced a total of a little over 17 tons of food for the hungry, I think a lot more can be done. How many people in America alone are online every day? I’d wager it’s much higher than 130,000. Surely all of us who have time to check our email, to check the stocks, to read the news, to watch videos on YouTube… surely we have 30 seconds a day to go to the site and click a button. When you think about how important it really is in comparison to the rest of the stuff we do online, it should actually be the thing we do when we get online, if we do absolutely nothing else.

Lastly, I’m going to tag some people to pass this along. Who am I tagging? Everyone who has a blog. Seriously. If you have a blog, I’m asking you to blog about this, and in turn, tag everyone who reads your blog who also has a blog of their own. Sure, some people will have already known about the site, but I’m sure many of the people reached will be people who didn’t know about the site. If you feel that you don’t have time to write up a post about it, steal this post in its entirety. I won’t mind at all.

The more people who know, the more clicks there are, the more people who won’t die from starvation. Pass this along, please.

Alright, now for something a bit different…

My feed stats tell me that there are approximately 50 people who read my blog daily. My comment, on the other hand, have mostly has the same 5-10 people commenting over and over. There is, of course, nothing wrong with these 5-10 people; in fact, I’m quite fond of them. However, that leaves about 40 of you who I.. well, don’t know. I have no idea who you are. You are just numbers on a pretty graph. I really would like to know a little bit about the rest of you. What’s your name? What do you like on my blog? Do you have a blog? Do you like pizza? How about blueberry muffins? Cats or dogs? Tell me whatevever you want to (if you want to tell me anything, that is).

The ball is in your court.
Update: Well, the feed stats show that 47 of you got my blog updates today, and there have only been two comments on this post so far - both of which were done by folks who have commented in the past. My regular blog stats (i.e., not feed stats) show that 17 people have specifically hit this blog entry.

So uh… I guess I just have a lot of lurkers who don’t wish to comment, at all! And now, back to our regularly scheduled program (which is basically randomness, in a nutshell…)

No, I’ve not died, nor has System 13 been thrown onto the mass grave of abandoned blogs. The past few days I just haven’t really had any decent ideas to write about. Rather than force myself into writing and most likely producing crap, I’ve opted to just ride out the silence. I’m sure it will pass shortly. A few random updates which don’t really warrant their own entry:

• I’m nearly finished with One Dharma by Joseph Goldstein. I ended up choosing it for my third book for 52 Books in 52 Weeks. I’ve really enjoyed it. It takes a look at a lot of the different Buddhist traditions (Zen, Tibetan, Theravada, etc.), and tries to find their similarities. Ultimately what you get is a boiled down essence of Buddhism. I’ll write more on this once I finish the book up.
• The Asteroid Belt has not disappeared. The past couple of weeks, I just haven’t been surfing the web much, which has left me with a dearth of material to post about. Rather than posting a pathetic one or two links, I’ve opted to just skip TAB for a couple of weeks.
• Apparently, winter did not receive my letter. We have had no snow at all, and it continues to rain nearly daily. The ground has become an amazingly icky mud swamp. Ironically, the only time it gets better is when it drops below freezing, at which point the ground freezes. Of course, when that happens, the precipitation disappears to insure that we don’t get snow. Winter, you suck.
• A friend of mine (hey, Marcel!) emailed me asking if I was sure about the tankhunters using bicycles with panzerfausts attached to the front. Yep, I am. The panzerfausts weren’t attached facing forward to fire; they were strapped upright, one on each side of the front wheel, solely for transport. When a tank was found, the tankhunter would get off the bike and remove one of the panzerfausts. Here’s a picture. Yes, that’s a picture of a toy replica; I couldn’t find a decent one of the real thing. Pity; there was a few excellent ones in the book.

It seems that due to me being an early adopter of the CSS upgrade, my blog as well as a few others have been featured on the WordPress.com blog. Cool!

So, hello to all of the visitors from there (some 350 thus far, as my blog stats show!). I hope you find something of interest.