American Madness

I was right. It didn’t take me to the end of the month to post 500. That last post did it (this one makes 501). Of course now the question remains how long until I hit 1000.

Today will hopefully also mark Josh’s 200th post (when he gets around to writing one more). We are just hitting milestones left and right around here. Following that, it will be a race to see who writes the 1000th post (only 162 posts to go) while Eric and Adam
working towards 100 each (they are tied with 34 posts each).

We’ll keep writing as long as you keep reading! OK, actually, we’ll keep writing regardless of whether you’re reading or not, but we prefer when you read and comment on what we’ve written. It makes us feel like there is actually someone else out there reading this stuff besides just us.

It has been a while since my last post, mainly because I have been so busy at work that I haven’t had time to catch up with a lot of news, but things are starting to slow down a bit so I might have a chance to read a bt more and write some more (it makes a huge difference when you do not feel burnt out when you get home).

March for AmericanMadness will hopefully signify two milestones around these parts. We are inching our way closer to 1000 posts (just 193 to go) which means if the full AmericanMadness Crew puts a good push in this month we could hit that point (though, admittedly most likely it will be April… maybe May).

The other milestone is for me. I am aiming to hit 500 posts by March 29th (including this one, I’ve got 16 to go). “Why such an obscure date?”you ask (and I’m glad you did). Well, I started writing for AM on March 30th, 2007. I figure 500 posts (or if things are going the way I hope they will 500+ posts) is a nice way to wrap up a full year.

Anyway, enough of that, let’s get to something interesting…

[ This opinion piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal on February 20. It is reprinted here with the permission of author Betsy McCaughey Ross, a former lieutenant governor of New York, currently serving as an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute (the original "think tank"). ]

On March 4, voters in the Texas Democratic primary will choose between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The battle is shaping up to be a health-care Alamo. Twenty five percent of people living in the Lone Star state are uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. That’s the highest rate of any state.

Sen. Clinton has issued the challenge, telling Sen. Obama “I’ll see you in Texas.” She promises to provide health coverage for “every single one of the nation’s 47 million uninsured,” and she accuses Sen. Obama of offering a “band aid” solution that would leave about a third of those 47 million uncovered.

(more…)

So, originally when we hit 300 readers I was going to post something along the lines of the movie poster for 300. It happened so quickly after the 200 mark though that I decided it was a little too much of tooting our own horn.

In my last stat analysis I was wondering if we would hit 300 posts or visitors first, well, this makes 251 posts here now and yesterday we had over 560 visitors, though about half of them were referred here from Eater, we still welcome the love since we do have a tendency to write about food every now and again.

For a while some variation of “kool aid pickle recipe” dominated our search terms (now it is only 3 out of the top 10). For the record I am still looking for a recipe to try out. “eating lemons” has held strong at the third most popular term for getting here and we still have a serial killer in the top 10 with the appearance of “Robert Charles Browne.” Sorry to disappoint the folks looking to learn more about “Ashera cats,” our #1 search term, but we only have the 1 article on it, though apparently there is some debate as to if it is a breed of its own or just a Savannah cat with a jacked up price tag.

And, just for good measure I am throwing a new link in here about an exhibit by Doo Sung Yoo called Lie. “This is another example from his series about the relationships between biological objects and machines.” The piece combines cow tongues with robots, creating, you guessed it, robot cow tongues. There is even a video of the tongues in action.

First I would like to thank all of our readers and glancers- Yesterday we passed 200 page views in a single day (219 to be exact)! Yeah, go us. Now let’s see if we hit 300 posts or 300 viewers first.

Next up I am going to post a quick follow up to the Google Maps new Street View function, a couple of folks have been wondering (including myself) how they actually go about getting those photos. Apparently it isn’t a man with a camera and a tripod taking a panoramic photo every 15 feet, but rather a van that does that, Engadget has a photo and a brief write up on it.

Next we have another Graffiti piece (don’t ask how you write a follow up to a piece you posted less then an hour ago, sometimes ti just happens) I am just going to post the original article and the follow up, there was a reason I didn’t really get into this one, but basically a school on the Lower East side had to paint over a wall twice due to Graffiti and posted a note to the writer/community about the damage that writing on walls does to the school it was written on. After learning the meaning of the graffiti, they followed their message up with a second note to the community posted on the wall. Definitely shows a social consciousness and works on building a stronger community up around the school. The original note is here and this is the follow-up from Gothamist

And for those of you looking for Kool-Aid Pickle Recipes I am working on locating one, or just giving it a whirl myself. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we have a real Kool-Aid Pickle recipe up here.

Ok, what’s the deal?
I have recently been checking out the stats for the site. Ok, I have actually become a little obsessed with checking them. Some make total sense to me, others confuse the hell out of me, and some scare me a bit, let’s just run through a few:
The 4th most popular search term to find American Madness: “Robert Charles Browne” are there a lot of people interested in serial killers who come to our site and are just disappointed that American Madness is not a site devoted to US serial killers?
Then there is the 3rd most popular search term: “Eating Lemons,” there was an article posted 2 years ago about eating lemons, and the concern of dentists in Texas with this phenomena. This article is so popular that it is our 3rd most viewed posting. Can some one who stumbled upon us while searching for “Eating Lemons”tell me what they are actually looking for? I am genuinely interested.

Also, hello to our international readers, especially the ones from Palam, Taipei, Clontarf, Kiev, Kaisariani, Caracas and Budakeszi (not that I want to leave anyone out like most of our European readers and our US readers, especially the huge showing in NYC where about 10% of our readers subside).