Thursday 29 September 2005

Nothing to add

It's not surprising that very few of the posts on this blog attract any comments. The explanation could be that its most constant readers are diffident about expressing fulsome praise, or are merely stunned into admiring silence by the forceful arguments and undeniably accurate analyses it contains, or the general percipience of its content. My own view, however, is that after their biweekly perusal of the latest posts these readers simply have no time to spare to set out their own viewpoints, most of them being fully occupied by such things as chairing multinationals, running major law practices, fulfilling their ministerial responsibilities or studying for their doctorates.

However, there are exceptions, and it is interesting to note that it is the posts dealing with the least interesting topics that seem to attract the most comments. For example, a boring and facetious item I posted about an opinion poll attracted some 2,000 words of comment: after a brief and relevant comment from an old friend, two other ladies joined in with lengthy dissertations on feminist issues. I felt impelled to insert some hot news about gastro-oesophageal reflux before drawing the stimulating discussion to a close.

I suppose all this happened because the word sex had cropped up in the original post; similarly, a rather feeble post in which Jehovah was mentioned inspired a bit of tedious chat. Yet what I thought was a fascinating piece - lavishly illustrated - about the theatre in North Korea evoked no comments at all.

So you really can’t tell. Perhaps there are keywords other than the two I have mentioned which are bound to provoke a reaction from readers; I might try a few.

8 comments:

Marc said...

Personally, my hectic beer-drinking, cheeto-eating days leave me too discombobulated to be able to accomplish the basic tasks neccessary for civilized human life (like paying bills, personal hygiene, etc), much less comment on blog posts, funny/witty/fascinating as they may be.

Crap. I just got cheeto-dust all over my keyboard. These things are so hard to clean.

MrVilhauer said...

I'm actually too selfish to write responses, most of the time. Why waste them on your site when I could drive up the number of searchable terms on my own?

Regardless of this fact, I comment whenever I can.

I have to add: I'm rather intimidated by you. You use many more words than I do. People coming here from my site realize my youth and my lack of experience in using this language.

Damn it, you've ruined it for me.

Tony said...

Yes, I quite understand, Marc. But please do your best to contribute - an occasional intervention fom a boozy, smelly, overweight Texan will do wonders to improve OMF's prim, effete image. And, Mr Corey Vilhauer, you may use less words than I do but you probably know lots of words that I don't, like cheeto. I don't want to ask Marc what these are, it would only cause discombobulation; my guess is that they are some kind of hominy grits which you eat with hot tamales and corn pone.

Unknown said...

I particularly liked "This Sporting Life", but I never got the time to post the ample response it deserved. Before long, a couple of weeks had passed and the world had moved on to greater things: like supermodel drug scandals and party conferences...

MrVilhauer said...

Cheetos are a cheesy puffed corn snack. Here's a link: Cheetos!

I hope it works. I'm not as talented at HTML as I am at finding cheesy puffed corn snack web sites.

Tony said...

Well, it worked, taking me to an appalling noisy website which made me feel quite unwell. Thanks a million.
I shall have more to say on this subject next week, when I have recovered.

Marc said...

Here's a better link about cheetos by the way...

Tony said...

Yes thank you Marc, good old Wikipedia always gives you the facts.