WhimsyLand

I added up all the stats from the various counters I've had going since 2004, and it looks like I've surpassed 100,000 visitors.  Well, hits, actually.  There are probably only 15 different people who look in.  The latest stat counter has all kinds of interesting information to report.  One item of interest is what search term got a Whimsy-ite to the site.  There were a number of names, probably from people Googling themselves and no, I won't tell you who for fear of embarrassing someone. The number one search term this week was "d'artagnan heritage blue foot", which came as something of a surprise.  Recent visitors are almost all domestic friends, though there are a few odd lookers-in from France, Australia, Korea and Mexico (oddly, no Canadians).  Anyway, enough about that.  Ron probably gets 100,000 visits a month.

As you may know, my son Derek is studying music and music management at Columbia College.  One of his projects this semester is to produce a record (technically, I guess it's a two-song single) for the band Company of Thieves.  I hopped over to their My Space page and they are really good.  That's Genevieve Schatz, the lead singer.

I was just looking at my page of poetry contest recommendations, sighing at all the broken links, which I will have to fix one of these days.  I was also scanning the poetry manuscript competitions at Winning Writers, a great service run by Jendi Reiter and Adam Cohen.  One thing I've noticed recently is that nearly every small press seems to have gone to contest mode (as opposed to accepting-manuscripts-thrown-over-the-transom mode).  The second thing I've noticed is that reading fee inflation is upon us, with most of the competitions charging $25 as an entry fee.  February is a busy month for manuscript competitions.  There's the Cleveland Poets Series, the Donald Hall prize, the Fence Modern Poets Series, the National Poetry Series, the Violet Reed Haas Prize, the Hudson Prize, the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Kathryn Morton Prize − all with deadlines in the next 30 days.