The first stage of grief, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously postulated, is denial.
So it’s hardly surprising that Paul Elam and his gang of flunkies and fans at A Voice for Men have responded to the news that my site is besting AVFM in traffic by trying to claim that my traffic is somehow … fake.
Elam’s “evidence” for this assertion? He poked around my site for a few minutes and couldn’t find any posts that felt really “viral” to him.
He explained his, er, logic in a post yesterday. (You’ll have to excuse his terrible prose; he’s apparently running out of ways to call me fat.)
The gynecomastia plagued mammoth hunter’s sudden, meteoric rise into alleged relevance can only be explained by one thing. There must have been a stratospherically viral article (usually meaning more than two paragraphs) penned by the Wizard of Wallow that must have been picked up by every major media outlet in the mainstream.
Trouble is, we could not find it. A complete search of his website for something that coincided with his liftoff into the upper echelons of Alexa rankings, only turned up more of his usual fare. Quote mining, distortions, lies, poorly written snark and hundreds of comments, most of which have nothing to do with the OP and everything to do with kittens.
I’m not sure how one is supposed to be able to tell how much traffic a post has generated just by looking at it; it’s a bit like trying to tell how fast a car can go by looking at it parked.
But using some methodology of his own, apparently based not so much on what is true as on what he desperately wants to be true, he concludes that I bought the traffic using some of that sweet sweet cash I apparently get from the Femilluminati overladies.
So, that leaves us with only one other conclusion about David’s strut-worthy presence on Alexa. He paid for it. Yes, for those who cannot create real traffic, it can be purchased. Of course, purchasing a fake Alexa ranking is, well, fake. But what better tool for web presence could there ever be for a fake writer, with fake ideas waging a fake war against fake enemies for the approval of fake allies?
Also, I’m a big fan of fried chicken. (How did he know?)
A fake Alexa ranking fits on David Futrelle like a day old bucket of fried chicken fits in his lap . And it will probably last about as long given it requires regular financial maintenance.
Elam’s preoccupation with Alexa is a little weird. I didn’t even mention Alexa in my post comparing my traffic to his. Alexa’s numbers for my site and his are based on estimates — extimates that I’m pretty sure are something less-than-reliable, at least when it comes to my site.
No, the reason I know that I’m getting more traffic than A Voice for Men – or at least that I was getting more when I wrote my post on the subject – has nothing to do with Alexa rankings. It’s because Elam posted a screenshot of his actual traffic stats. Which I was able to compare to the traffic stats I get directly from WordPress. (You can see my screenshot and his in my post om the subject.)
The closest thing to “evidence” Elam has to back up his false accusation that my traffic is “fake” is based on something called Google PageRank, a zero-to-ten ranking that provides at least a rough representation of a site’s importance in the internet world. (Zero is totally obscure; ten means you’re as popular as Google.) Unfortunately, Elam’s internet research skills leave something to be desired, and his “evidence” isn’t actually evidence of anything real.
Elam reports that when he typed his site’s url into a site that tracks PageRank it got a rating of 5. He typed WeHuntedTheMammoth.com into the same page and it gets a PageRank of … zero.
Which would be pretty damning, except that it’s meaningless.
You see, the real URL for this blog is manboobz.wordpress.com; that’s the URL that WeHuntedTheMammoth.com redirects you to. And if you type manboobz.wordpress.com into that same PageRank site that Elam used, you’ll see that my site has a Google PageRank of … 4, pretty close to that of AVFM.
Seriously, Paul, try it yourself if you don’t believe me.
So, no, Paul, I didn’t buy traffic or whatever it is you think I did to get “fake” traffic for my “fake” writing.
You want to know the real secret behind the increased traffic to my site? Well. I don’t know if you realized it, Paul, but last year was kind of a breakout year for online misogyny. You remember that whole GamerGate thing? I wrote a lot about that, including a number of posts that collected together a lot of information that other people found useful.
If you look at my most-read posts from the past year – here, here and here – you can see that a lot of people did in fact find them useful: each one was shared on Twitter and Facebook literally thousands of times, as you can see by scrolling down to the bottom of each post. (Or did I fake those too?)
Also, I started writing more than one post a day. All else being equal, more posts means more traffic.
The flipside is that all this misogyny and all this writing kind of burned me out, and I’ve been taking a bit of a breather for the last few weeks, writing fewer posts and taking some days off. So my traffic has slowed a bit. Heck, my traffic may have dropped back down to AVFM levels.
But I’m not worried, Paul. As long as terrible and ridiculous people like you keep saying and doing terrible, ridiculous things, I’m not going to run out of things to write about. And as long as people are interested in hearing about people like you, it seems likely that I’ll continue to get enough traffic to reduce you to tooth-grinding rage.
I can only hope you’re able to work y0ur way through the other stages of grief until you finally reach acceptance. Because right now your desperation is so obvious it can probably be seen from space. It’s not a good look for you.
My second year of classical Greek was an Open Unversity course I took after Uni. When I mentioned this to the gf of a friend she looked taken aback and asked ‘Why ?’. She looked even more shell-shocked when I said ‘For fun!’.
I’ve been slut-shamed before, but that’s the only time I’ve been Classical Greek-shamed 😛
Cuspinique, I’m so sorry about your kitty. 🙁
Cassie’s Major Domo, that sounds so cool!
gilshalos, what a poem. 😀
I read a one verse version of it in a book once.
I wish I could remember the title or author, cos I loved it. It was about a main character (female) who, at her family home, resonated between her real life and that of an ancestress. Her ancestress’ brother had the version of that poem.
That poem sounds awfully familiar, and makes me wonder if gilshalos and I are about the same age, or if many generations of British schoolchildren all chanted the same thing.
Well, the version of the Aeneid I studied for Highers (generation warning!) was published 100 years back at my state school. I was very lucky we even had the Latin option.
Personally I loved the Ovidian versions of Sappho’s poetry we studied at Uni
Sorry for your loss Cuspinique, she was a real beauty and so wee. That was a sweet video with her by every cat’s favorite place, their owner’s open laptop.
If David had looked up AVoM and gotten a 0 he would have realized he mistyped the address rather than take a screenshot and celebrate, but that’s the difference between a journalist and a bitter disingenuous asshole I suppose.
One I learned from another Latin student:
Roses are red, daffodils are yellow,
What’s a puer without a puella?
I got sort of science-shamed by my mum. I told her that I sometimes had to squint, or even give up on some pages, when I was digitising weather records. Why on earth would you want to do that??!!? with a sort of sneer. I thought it was a good thing to do.
More importantly, crowd sourcing all the tedious copy work for this sort of thing is one of the great advantages of the internet in my view. No one could ever find the money to pay people to do this stuff. An hour or less whenever you feel in the mood is not doable any other way. (Half of the reason I did it was because I could.) The more the better. Though I’ve sort of given up for the time being, the record set they’re now working on is much less readable than the one that’s finished. I’m happy to wait until another dataset (copperplate handwritten recordbook, in fact) comes up.
“The gynecomastia plagued mammoth hunter’s sudden, meteoric rise into alleged relevance can only be explained by one thing. There must have been a stratospherically viral article (usually meaning more than two paragraphs) penned by the Wizard of Wallow that must have been picked up by every major media outlet in the mainstream.”
Speaking of relevance, it’s only because of “the gynecomastia plagued mammoth hunter” I even know what a Paul Elam is. And that is: A sad, bitter little man with a following of other sad, bitter little men who collect silly little boys to turn them into more sad, bitter little men so they can all be sad, bitter and utterly impotent together until their sad, bitter and ultimately meaningless lives come to their sad, bitter and miserable end.
Casandra asked:
Ecce! In pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia. Cornelia est puella Romana quae in Italia habitat.
And now that you’ve met Cornelia, let’s read about branding an escaped slave!
re: who would staple a cat’s tail?:
Right bastards, that’s who.
When he took her into the vet, they said that there were even some in her spine and it was just chance that she wasn’t more injured.
Mr said that for months after he took her in he didn’t even know that he had a cat except that food would disappear, the litter would need to be scooped, and there were phantom white hairs throughout his apartment.
One day when he was reading, she poked her head out and slunk over to him. He pet her, she crawled in his lap, and she was fine (with him) after that.
cupin – Thank you for sharing your video. She seems like she was a dear. You gave her a good life.
I am always so torn about paying attention to people like Paul Elam. Paying attention to them, what they say in some ways gives them the idea they are important. They start taking up space in our minds and take up our valuable time. Paul must imagine that what he spouts is meaningful if people pay a lot of attention to it. I wonder what would happen if no one in opposition paid him any mind. He must fee quite important when he sees how much time we give him. If i go look at and read is blog, in many ways I feel he’s won. He got me to read a piece of absolute nonsense that is so much more stupid than it is offensive. So why give him time and time to others like him?
In this way I am very torn because he and people like him seek to indoctrinate others to their views, seek to get young men and boys to see the world in the way they do. So the other side of the coin is that they are dangerous and I can therefore understand wanting to know what it is they are saying because it can hurt people.
I can certainly attest to this. I got linked here first from Jezebel on one of the toxic masculinity posts after Eliot Rodger, and I stuck around once GG got into full swing.
And also because cats are awesome and you guys are pretty damn hilarious, especially when you’ve got a troll to bat around.
I once read a critical commentary on the old-fashioned Latin textbook approach which pointed out that every practice translation sentence was essential: “O senators, do not place the statues of impious men in the city.”
That’s why Ovid is such a nice break.
My third semester Latin course was all Catullus all the time. Man, was it dirty–and I was getting credit for it! (The poem about the Spaniard who brushes his teeth with urine is particularly funny.) However, it’s hard not to tear up when Catullus bemoans the death of his beloved’s pet bird.
Inti’s gone? Aw, NO. Such a cute, sweet kitty! I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the best remedy for that…is another kitty. It’s never too soon. Trust me. Not to replace her, because that’s impossible, but because kitties are good for everything.
And classical Greek shaming! What is the world coming to? I know it may be out of date, but it was even when I took it, and I still had fun with it…
And Latin, too. Here’s my favorite quasi-Latin poem, courtesy of Mater Anser:
Cano carmen sixpence, a corbis plena rye,
Multas aves atras percoctas in a pie;
Ubi pie apertus, tum canit avium grex;
Nonne suavis cibus hoc locari ante rex?
Fuisset rex in parlor, multo de nummo tumens;
Regina in culina, bread and mel consumens;
Ancilla was in horto, dependens out her clothes;
Quum venit parva cornix demorsa est her nose.
True story: for a Latin assignment, we had to take a popular song and translated it into Latin that could “scan” and work as a sung number. I picked “Goldfinger.” I wish I still had it. The title was “Digitus Auri.”
I do remember the first line: “Digitus Auri. Hic illle vir, vir cum tacto Midae… tacto aranea…”
It didn’t sing well as I remember. I got a “B”.
Oh Catullus!
I think I still have my book of his poems somewhere. Right now I can only remember the translations of the ones we studied. Don’t think we did the Spaniard one.
That man seems to be like a God,
Who sitting opposite you,
Can hear time and again your sweet laughter.
For as soon as I saw you Lesbia,
My voice was nothing in my mouth…
OK, that’s about what I remember. But not bad after uh..*cough* 23 years.
*giggle* In High School Latin Higher we studied Cicero’s letters, and the teacher gave the title and publisher in the sheet. My classmate (there were only 2 of us in the class, and when I took CSYS I was the first in 20 years) asked why it was Letters from a Stoic Penguin’. To which my teacher replied @Because they are very stoic birds! You just have to watch them standing about on freezing rocks!!’
I should try that sometime! I don’t think my Latin is up to scratch, though. I do remember translating Beatles songs into German once, just for Schiss and giggles; it was easier. “Let It Be”, in particular…although “Mother Mary” tripped me up, since Mary is Maria in German, and that’s three syllables. Ah well!
@Bina
I think, given Latin’s brevity, just saying “Maria” would be sufficient and understood (and it covers all the syllables of the original, nice).
One of the more delightful parts of Pratchett’s work is the student Latin.
And apparently John Cleese taught Latin at some point before making The Life of Brian, so he enjoyed the Latin grammar scene.
John Cleese was the Rector of St Andrews Uni (my uni) at one point 🙂
@Falconer
Every Latin student or teacher knows that pain of forgetting the existence of the Locative, where some nouns do not take a preposition when paired with a motion verbs. So it’s not “ad domum” but just “domum.” So strange. (I mean, it’s not like English does anything strange like that.)
Also, I was in the top class for English in High School (reading does that), but the only people in that class who understood grammer were Latin or language students.
English grammer is strange, but schools seem to expect people to absorb it without knowing the rules.