2010 in review (courtesy of WordPress)

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,800 times in 2010. That’s about 16 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 200 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 560 posts. There were 101 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 108mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 23rd with 93 views. The most popular post that day was Jasper Schuringa is about to get a lot more friends.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, mail.yahoo.com, alphainventions.com, theatlanticwire.com, and translate.google.it.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for sam parnia, sagittarius, sol invictus, celebratingtime wordpress, and sam parnia 2010.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Jasper Schuringa is about to get a lot more friends December 2009
2 comments

2

Ah, Sagittarius November 2009

3

Christus Sol Invictus December 2009

4

A very convoluted way to reintroduce Sam Parnia February 2010
3 comments

5

Oh how I love word clouds September 2009

What atheists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have in common

I’m thinking that the next time a Jehovah’s Witness knocks on Sam Parnia’s door, he needs to invite him in.

Now of course I myself have never done this, being a person who’s so theologically irascible I get irritated even when people say they’re going to pray for me (which I guess they’d better, if they’re right and I’m wrong). But the other day was, as I told my hospice volunteer coordinator at the end of our monthly “Faith and the End of Life” series, the first time I voluntarily took handouts from a Jehovah’s Witness.

It’s pretty interesting, what they believe. When you die, you’re dead (Yes! says my true-atheist friend). You just lie there in your coffin, waiting, to the extent that a dead person can be said to wait, that is.

Then along comes Jesus, and everybody, good and bad, gets resurrected. But here’s the rub: only 144,000 of them get to go with him back up to heaven. And what happens to all the rest of the billions of people? They stay here, on Earth, except that Earth is now a paradise and there is no death.

So it seems like we’d all better try really really hard to become one of those 144,000; because we’re going to be awfully crowded on Earth, not to mention all those bad people rubbing up against us.

But what does all of this have to do with Sam Parnia? Well, I suspect the Jehovah’s Witness will tell him his experiment, to see whether clinically dead people can report back what they saw when they were floating on the operating room ceiling, is a waste of time.

Dead is dead, until…

Now all we need is a net

And now we know this not only applies to Xerxes’ horses, the Pony Express, and the Post Office, but also to surgeons, who just keep cutting despite sleet and snow and trees falling down and roads closing; but at least Chip’s hernia now has a patch that, we’re all glad to know, looks like a badminton shuttlecock.

And we’re also glad to know he didn’t leave his body to report on Sam Parnia’s pictures.

A very convoluted way to reintroduce Sam Parnia

When I was working on my book Celebrating Time, someone gave me a huge book called The Secret Language of Birthdays. At first I thought it was right up my alley: it has a page for every date of the year, with the astrological sign, associated planets, a list of people who were born on that day, a description of what all those people are supposedly like, and a little soupçon of advice.

I was hoping for, very unrealistically, something deductive: given the alignment of everything on this date, all the things that make it different from every other date, here’s what to expect, what people born on this date tend to have in common, etc. (I know that’s crazy.)

And so we come to today. They call it “the day of precognition.” Why? Well, we look over at the list of people born on this date and guess what? Both Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jules Verne were born on February 8. Now Jules Verne is the science fiction writer who predicted all kinds of things, like cars and rockets and air conditioning and television; and Swedenborg is the guy who saw a fire in Stockholm when he was over 200 miles away; learning, two days later, that there really had been a fire in Stockholm.

But this is inductive reasoning, working up to a generalization from particulars (not to mention all the perfectly ordinary people they ignored who were also born on this date). My birthday, to provide another example, is called “the day of emotional stimulation.” Now does this have something to do with Henry VIII, born on that date? All those wives? That’s pretty funny, especially given the advice they provide: “Work on your destructive side.”

Okay, I’m giving up on this book, which I should have done long ago. But just to throw a bone to Swedenborg, who wrote long dissertations about how the soul is separate from the body, here’s an update on Sam Parnia, who’s doing that experiment to see if people who have near death experiences can see things while they’re dead.

Marriage is sacred, except for Karl Rove’s

New Year’s resolutions, four days late, but better than never:

I will continue to write this blog every day; at least I’ll try very hard to write every day. It feels good once it’s done, like banging your head against a wall, and sometimes it’s even fun during the writing part.

I won’t write anymore about saints. For one thing, my true-atheist friend, who’s one of my most loyal readers and so I really do have to take her wishes into account, has a hard time with all those dead people she’s never heard of; and for another thing, one of my oldest friends, another loyal reader, who struggled with the Catholic religions along with me and therefore has heard of all those dead people, tells me she skips all the saint entries. And, likewise, no more Catholic feast days, or even Eastern Orthodox feast days, even though they’re a lot more interesting.

I will write more about interesting people’s birthdays because, after all, most people do celebrate the time of their birthday, whereas all the saints’ days celebrate the dates they were (mostly) gruesomely murdered, and so unless they’re up there watching, they themselves certainly never celebrated their saint’s day.

I’ll probably write about holidays here and there. But maybe not.

For my Sam Parnia buffs: yes, I’ll continue to write about him, and spooky stuff about death and dying, and weird scientific experiments.

I will continue my fair and balanced political observations, beginning today with the news that seems to have been conveniently buried under the holidays, not to mention the Christmas bomber: Karl Rove is getting divorced! For the second time!

And if you can’t figure out who that charming guy is up in the left hand corner, you, unlike him, haven’t been following Karl Rove closely enough.

The End of the Worst Decade, but now what?

This is it. I am declaring the end of The Worst Decade series, because not too much seems to have happened in 2007 except for the “surge” in Iraq that I didn’t want to believe was the right decision but it seems like maybe it was; and because we all know what happened in that nail-biting year 2008 when finally reason and intelligence won out over ideology and manipulation; and 2009 is over already, and while the snarky Bush critiques roll right off my fingers, writing about Obama takes a lot more thought, unless you’re someone holding up my un-nuanced position on the other side.

Instead, I need I try to figure out how to shape Celebrating Time for the coming year. It was supposed to be, literally, one year of celebrating time, a day at a time. So there are all the holidays, and the saints’ days, and some quirky little days, but there really aren’t 365 celebrations worth writing about; so I found myself instead moving into politics and history, and some weird stuff like Sam Parnia, who still accounts for the most Google searches that lead people to my blog (just thought I’d get him in here again to boost readership).

I was actually going to end it one year later, which would be January 5. But several very nice people have told me they really like reading it, and please don’t stop!

I envy those blogs where the author puts out a question and thousands of people reply (well, that would be a little overwhelming; you’d have to read all those suggestions, and they’d contradict each other, and then people would start fighting among themselves in your very own comments section, and trolls would appear, and you’d have to moderate, and…). Okay, well maybe a blog where ten like-minded people would reply. I do have readers I know nothing about, which I know from this cool chart (those 24% from “unknown” are the most intriguing!):

So, okay, I’m not going to stop. I’ll try something new, and in two days, maybe I’ll even know what it is.

Facebook therapy

I love the way WordPress tells you what seach engine terms people used to find your blog. The day before yesterday, for example, there were: tres riches heures de duc de berry limbo [limbo? The thing with the stick? Or the place for little unbaptized babies? The duc is in quite strange company here]; games on personal mastery; celebrating catholic feast days; german holidays and what they are; and sam parnia [nearly every day, by the way, someone arrives via Sam Parnia. Since he’s a friend of my daughter’s, someday I’ll have to tell him that].

But yesterday, someone got to me via Facebook marketing strategies. Now this is weird, because I’ve never written about Facebook. In fact, I have a very troubled relationship with Facebook. I joined so I could view a friend’s pictures, but that’s all I did. So I’m represented by one of those half-dead-looking avatars, and Facebook keeps asking me if they should refer to me as “he” or “she.” I keep getting messages from people “friending” me, but I don’t respond, which is more curmudgeonly than I usually am, since I really like these people.

I like the idea of keeping in touch with people, but the whole writing on people’s walls idea is a bit too cute for me, not to mention status updates. What am I doing right now? I’m writing on Facebook, duh. Any other questions?

Maybe I need to get myself a Facebook therapist to help me figure out what my problem is (though they’re probably all tied up dealing with the Facebook addicts). But meanwhile, whoever you are who found me that way, welcome!

The Assumption

Here’s a story I’d never heard before, despite all my years of Roman Catholic indoctrination. Shortly after Jesus died, St. Thomas was preaching in India when he found himself suddenly swept up in a swirling cloud. He ended up hovering just above Mary’s tomb (like Dr. Sam Parnia’s dead people in the OR), and saw her body rising up out of it. When he asked her where she was going, she, believe it or not, threw her girdle at him! (This is actually less salacious than it sounds, because a girdle in those days meant a belt-like cloth around the waist. And if you’re as doubting as Thomas was, you can actually see this green piece of cloth if you happen to be in Florence today, but you have to go to mass at the Duomo, where it’s only displayed five times a year.)

Anyway, her whole body rose up into heaven. Thomas landed near some other apostles and they all went into Mary’s tomb where, for some strange reason, they decided to smell the clothes she’d left behind (does this mean she was naked except for the girdle?), which had a wonderful sweet smell, the “odor of sanctity.”

And one more strange element for a very odd story: it’s also called the Feast of the Dormition, or the Feast of the Falling Asleep of the All Holy Mother of God.

Jesus died, but got resurrected, but for some reason they didn’t want to say Mary died. But if she didn’t die, but only fell asleep, what was she doing in a tomb?

Emanuel, please contact Sam

If Emanuel Swedenborg had been at my house for dinner (assuming I was living in Gothenburg, which is where he was dining) on July 19, 1759, and if he had described a fire in Stockholm, 300 miles away, that was at that moment threatening his house; and if, a few hours later, he told me it had been extinguished, and his house was saved; and if, two days later (since news traveled slowly then), every detail of his account had been confirmed by a messenger from Stockholm, my entire world view would be forever changed.

If this really happened, as all historical accounts say it did, it means that consciousness does not always coincide with the physical location of the brain – just as Dr. Sam Parnia is speculating.

I hope that Swedenborg, who was a scientist as well as a philosopher, is somewhere up there guiding the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study. Maybe their consciousnesses can get in touch.

What would you do in an astral body?

Dr. Parnia’s experiment, where he’s testing whether the clinically dead people who say they floated up to the ceiling of the operating room can actually report on what they see up there, is a pretty ingenious way to bring science to the esoteric. But think about it. If you were in cardiac arrest, and found yourself on the ceiling, what would you be doing?

If you were an optimist, you’d probably be trying to encourage all the people working on your body. If you were a pessimist, you’d be trying to find the waiting room so you could say goodbye to your family. The last thing I’d be thinking about, for sure, is what was in those pictures.