A nice little graph showing page views for my blog always pops up as soon as I open the dashboard. It's a nice bit of ego-boosting, or would be if I ever got more that barely-double digit pageviews in a day. I bring it up because the graph of the past week of traffic nicely mirrors my own feelings about this 30 Day Challenge; nothing on the first day, followed by a slow rise over the next two days, which leads into a sharp climb for two days. And then comes the inevitable crash when readers/I realize there isn't anything of interest going on. Then there is a small bounce over the last two days indicating a low-level interest still burning in a few die-hards.
Masochists, the lot of us.
Now, once more I was going to try and write a poetry-centric post, using some of the many fragments of poems I have written over the past months, but rather than finish the one I had been working on at work, or transcribing the rest, I allowed myself to get distracted by a post over on io9.com about an abandoned Russian airfield.
This led to an ADHD-fueled tour of Wikipedia starting with the Tu-22 bomber, and ending with the KS-1 Komet. Stops along the way also included the entries for the bouncing bomb; the definition of a "fleet in being"; and the Tallboy, a precursor to today's bunker buster bombs.
The pictures of the Russian airfield, and pictures from the West Coast mothball fleet, also put me in mind of just how optimistic so many apocalyptic stories are when it comes to technology. Nearly all of them have the plucky survivors of whatever flavor armageddon is popular at the time finding and salvaging weapons and technology from hidden bunkers that have survived the ravages of time. The most egregious example of which is the the Fallout series of games.
Seriously, take a close look at the decrepit hulks of those ships, and the empty shells of those Russian aircraft, and tell me with a straight face that anything made in the last fifty years would last twenty years unattended, nevermind one hundred and fifty!
Also, enjoy this Tiny Desk Concert by the Kopecky Family Band.