Pause and Rewind - Who is actually reading this?

This week I got my 20,000 hit. Of course I was tracking it and for a moment felt a sense of achievement. After all, I've been read on over 20,000 different occasions now which feeds my ambitions of being the next Roald Dahl. Except for that if I reflect on my own reading habits, I rarely get to the end of a reading a blog post so I'm not sure how much I actually am read? Trying to work out why people end up at maximobo.com, I looked at the search items that were sending people to the blog page:

In the past month, the series of posts that I wrote about my 2010 trip  to India have scored me a lot of hits. Likewise, the blogs on my wedding which I seemingly did well to name after an awful Hollywood film. Not sure about "piss man", and how that relates to what I've previously written and I don't even want to know how I appear on the search list for grandmaf**k. Regardless of that (hopefully random, like this week's search item that I also have of "baby tigger tackes poo"), it is flattering as I do write to be read.

But this is about as far as it goes. A friend who is an ex-editor told me that their main line of rejection is "go write a blog", and she was polite enough after reading this to say that I was "funny" but that I should continue to "write a blog"... Except for that when newspapers copy my ideas, such as last month when upon being prescribed glasses for the first time in my life, I reflected on the likelihood of me not winning a tennis grandslam because I'm close to 30. This has subsequently been picked up by the New York Times. So I can pretend that the only thing preventing me from really getting read, is a ready source of quotes. I better get my quotes soon as the New York Times article confirms that the chance of a tennis career is really over.

As the demands that professional players face continue to increase, Ferreira said, “You’re going to see the tennis career start narrowing a bit, maybe 19, 20 to 29, 30.

Pause & Rewind: Reviewing Beer

My high-school best friend likes hobbies apparently. I don't always remember this being the case and we spent a considerable amount of our spare time together during that period playing brass instruments and Playstation. What I do remember is playing Fifa '99 on the Playstation (it didn't have a number then), him playing as Iran and being 4-0 up at half time, and me playing as Fiorentina and winning 5-4. That is another blog post however.

One of his current hobbies is to blog about beer, which he does so succesfully that he has breweries in the UK sending him free samples to review. This week's blog is my first contribution as a guest post.

 Repressed, Semi-precious, Dubious, Lingering, #2

What is amusing is that if it hadn't been posted now, a lot of the cliches would have been out of date considering how quickly the country is moving forwards politically. Off to the 7/11 to get some San Miguel to review Filipino beer (I like this hobby!).