One Year EXTRAVAfuckinGANZA

On December 18th of last year I made my first post: 365 days later you get to read this gem. The excitement is palpable no? This is one of the few posts that I'm starting days (and days) before posting it so that I can make sure I get everything into it that occurs to me about the last year of blogging about UAA Seawolf Hockey.

First I want to give some shout outs to regular readers. I get some strange hits from time to time on my counter. How folks end up here from Khazakstan, Bogota, Cape Town or Punjab is a mystery to me. It almost certainly had nothing to do with the subject of this blog. There are a few regulars though that for whatever reason come back very regularly that I always notice. There's Guam. That's right. I have a Guamanian reader. I've always wanted to find a way to work "Guamanian" into a sentence and now I've done it twice. The posting fireworks are just beginning! I know from USCHO's fan forum (hereafter referred to as "crazytown") that my Guamanian reader is indeed a Seawolf fan. Another unusually located reader is from Shreveport and he sometimes posts over at crazytown. My Who 'Dat Tigers? post was a sort of shoutout. And yeah I know Shreveport ain't necessarily LSU country it was all I could come up with at that moment. At least it was a Louisianna reference.

I've either got at least one person's attention in Stockholm and he or she either uses 4 or 5 different computers or I've got multiple readers from there. I'm going with the multiple people theory. I like to see the hits from Mainuhs. I assume those are fans that like to see how Campbell Blair is getting along. Of course there's a boatload of folks reading this stuff in Canadia (Port Coquitlam, Winnipeg, Victoria, Mission, Burnaby, Port Moody, Vancouver, Kamloops, Kelowna, Whitehorse, Calgary, Edmonton etc ...). I'm just happy the language barrier isn't a problem for them. When the Canadian National team played here (quite a few years ago) in an exhibition vs. UAA we decided to sing "Oh Canada" since nobody else was (just being courteous). Everyone looked at us like we were from Mars. I'd imagine that Anchorage is one of the few places (outside of Canadia) where you can spend Canadian quarters, dimes, nickles and pennies just like they were real money. How cool is that? Everyone up here takes them (except for banks). I tried to pass a Canadian quarter in Denver once and pizza delivery guy looked at me like I was crazy ... so I popped a real one into his hand and he gave me the Canadian one back then he walked away shaking his head like I was some sort of counterfeiting terrorist. Denver is "crazytown" part deux. I have other regular readers from college hockey hotbeds D.C., Chicago, Toronto, and Sarasota.

Next up are the readers from WCHA region. And to them I just say ... yeah I hate your teams and if I can get a laugh doggin them or your locale ... then hey ... I'm gonna take a shot. It's all just in the tradition of competitive fandom (whatever that is ... I just made the phrase up). Outside of that context I wouldn't waste any of my time thinking (much less writing) about your various crappy towns. My sense of my audience tells me that my readers do "get" that. I'll continue to be both irreverent and disrespectful as I see fit. I'll continue to look at the team I support, share my thoughts and perspective. I'm all good with you reading and commenting here. If you're a regular reader and you haven't really checked out the comments sections you should do so. There's often humorous stuff there.

Of course most of the hits on the blog come from right here in Anchorage: but finishing a strong second place is Fairbanks. They know what it's like to be second to Anchorage so that's comforting.

Now onto some numbers. 27,381 total visits with 32,330 page views in the year. Quite a bit more than I would have thought when I started this. I watched the traffic regularly all through the year and I think it was in August or so that I started having a race with RWD over at RunningWiththeDogs. It is exactly the kind of race that most all of us have had at one time or another in our car. You're driving down the highway and everytime you begin to speed up just to get some distance between you and the guy in the next lane (just in case you might want to change lanes) he seems to speed up. It's on. Now you're racing the guy (he doesn't know it of course). That's the sort of race I've had with her. The only stat I know of hers is her total hits. In August she was a solid 4,500 or so page hits ahead of me. But during the past few months when she's been happily toddling along doing her usual thing I've been hard at work increasing my readership through strategic and tactical means that I simply can't describe here (DG posting hoaxes and getting linked on Fark.com brought in about 1500 over a couple of days). It's hard to lose especially when you didn't know you were racing. But RWD is a good loser. I hope.

The chart below comes from my counter site and shows the growth of readership over the past year. When I first hit 1000 reads a month in April I thought, "Cool" but in September I got to the 1000 a week threshold. DG's bogus-osity made the first 1000 per day. I doubt that will happen again anytime soon.

The next chart is a monthly view from November 18th to December 18th. The first peaks are in and around the week(end) that UAA swept UND.

Here's the 5 posts I've made in the last year that I'm most proud of:

1. The Pinnacle and The Rest of Us
2. Language and "Islmo-Fascism"
3. Coming to Anchorage?
4. Dickensian inspired trilogy about C.O.A.R. (Craphole On A River)
5. God Does Not Play Dice

Here's a few quality adjective strings to have sprung from a neverending adjective factory deep in my noodle:

"I'd imagine part of being a freshman on a WCHA team is a sort of deer-in-the-headlights glaze that's got to come over you a time or two playing in some of the road arenas in this league. Whether it's 10,000 automaton-prairie-susies (and it's thousands of images of a decapitated aboriginal adorning the Italian marble) interrupting the national anthem with their "and the home of the Siouuuuuuuuxxxx" crap; or the redundant spelling lesson from apparently repressed elementary school teachers escaping their corporate responsibilites at the Mariucci (hows that go? M-i-n-i-s-o-d-a?); or when the inevitable result of beer, brats and way too much cheddar in Madtown turns out to be cheerleading???; or even the beer induced rabble from St. Nothingelsetodoville overstuffed into a concrete mausoleum causing all the Polaris satin jackets to rub together and chirp like crickets; they're all distracting enough to make a rookies eyes go "What the fuck?"

"Hundreds of other D-1 players toil in near total anonymity getting little or no scholarship money but showing up for practice and standing ready to play whenever asked by their coaches. Without kids like these making personal committments to their teams (without any chance at glory) and donating their blood and sweat to the effort; D-1 hockey would be lessened in my eyes."

"in all this apparent fit of "dysfunctional gopher-love" is that UAA's only goal this weekend as a team should be ..."

"I'd think of every single metaphor for and example of great sports upsets. I'd pull Knute Rockne out of my ass."

And then there's always the SCSU inspired comments I've made:

"I have some advice; (It's the same sort of thing I would say to any miserable trailer-park fudge packer raised by monkeys) ..."
"The abyss of your stupidity apparently knows no bounds. You and your pre-menstrual concubine are pretty much the only 2 SCSU fans devoid of reasoning faculties."
"The secondary benefit of twisting your pink panties is just a bonus provided for real SCSU fans that already know what an insipid little tool you are."