what the fuck part 1 – is “fuck” still that big a deal?

Es­ti­mated reading time is 3 min­utes.

WHAT I WANT TO BE­LIEVE: a two-part ar­ticle that I pub­lished on here on April 9 and 10 was read by someone who then re­marked about my piece on his blog, and it turned a bunch of his readers onto my site. That is, my work was com­pli­mented by an­other blogger.

And the re­sult? Et factum est, le­gunt, et de­scripserunt.

In Eng­lish: “They came, they read, they registered.”

Or, the lesser event that I want to be­lieve is that the use of a cer­tain four-letter word at­tracted the at­ten­tion of a bunch of in­ternet surfers who typed it into their browser and that brought them to my site with the same response—to read, there­fore to register.

That is, what I want to be­lieve is cause = effect . . .

First came the cause, then the event

When there is an occurrence—especially one not ex­pected nor seem­ingly having been predictable—the human brain/consciousness often (usu­ally?) sees this oc­cur­rence as an ef­fect. The brain/consciousness then goes looking for a cause. When a cause is not found, some people write the whole af­fair off as a “mere” coincidence. 

But the human brain rarely has dif­fi­culty in finding a prob­able cause—even when it is, in fact, a rather im­prob­able cause.

So it is that my brain/consciousness is looking for a cause: nealumphred.com has en­joyed a minor ex­plo­sion of New User Reg­is­tra­tions un­like any that the site has ex­pe­ri­enced in the eight months it has been up and running.

And it all began on April 9.

Below is a list of the first eigh­teen days of the month of April 2014. The first column is the date (ob­vi­ously); the second column (in paren­theses) is the number of new ar­ti­cles that I posted that day; the third column (in bold print) is a number rep­re­senting units of new reg­is­tra­tions re­ceived that day.

An obvious response to the “fuck pieces”?

The figure “1” on April 1 stands for the av­erage number of new reg­is­tra­tions my site re­ceives during one day as de­ter­mined by the first three months of this year. It could be 1, it could be 10, it could be 100. On April 2, I re­ceived ex­actly twice as many as normal; a normal day sees a range of 1-2 reg­is­tra­tions (that is, the normal, base amount and up to twice that amount), as can be seen by the first week of April.

April 01  (1)     1.0
April 02  (1)    2.0
April 03  (1)    1.5
April 05  (0)   1.5
April 06  (1)   2.0
April 07  (2)   1.0
April 08  (3)  4.0
April 09  (1)   5.0
April 10  (2)   3.0
April 11  (0)   4.0
April 12  (0)  4.0
April 13  (2)   5.5
April 14  (1)   3.0
April 15  (1)   4.0
April 16  (1)   2.0
April 17  (0)  4.0
April 18  (0)  3.0
April 19  (0)  2.5
April 20  (0)  1.5
April 21  (1)   3.0
April 22  (1)   2.5

As you can plainly see, the in­crease in new reg­is­tra­tions began on April 8. On that day, I posted three new pieces, fol­lowing a day in which I had posted two. So the five post­ings in two days could ac­count for that jump in registrations.

What the fuck happened?

But here is what I want to see: that the rel­a­tive erup­tion of reg­is­tra­tions are an ef­fect due to a cause. And I have my cause picked out: on April 9, I posted a piece ti­tled “con­gress fucks with the most ef­fi­cient ben­efit pro­gram in the country . . . again (part 1).”

On that day, I re­ceived five times the normal amount of registrations.

On April 10, I posted two articles:

• “the re­turn of the little red motor scooter (and five dollar buck lunches, too)
• “con­gress fucks with the most ef­fi­cient ben­efit pro­gram in the country – again (part 2: the truth about the postal ser­vice’s man­u­fac­tured losses).”

On that day, I re­ceived three times the normal amount of registrations.

On the next two days (April 11-12), I posted nothing new, yet I still re­ceived four times the norm on both days! I want to be­lieve that his is con­tinued fallout from that other per­son’s men­tioning of my writing on his site.

It is pos­sible that I am in­fer­ring a spe­cific cause when, in fact, the event is just a likely oc­cur­rence given the length of time my site has been up, the number of ar­ti­cles reg­is­tering on browsers, the number of ac­cu­mu­lated readers ca­su­ally rec­om­mending me to a friend via email or con­ver­sa­tion, etc.

Since the title of this piece that you are reading is my third posting blaring the near-ubiquitous but nonethe­less for­ever frowned upon “four letter word,” the next two weeks should be in­ter­esting, hennah?


Images of Lincoln and Trump with the caption, "Republicans – What the Fuck Happened?"

FEA­TURED IMAGE: When I typed “what the fuck: into Google, I wasn’t cer­tain what would turn up in the Im­ages sec­tion. I found the image above as a magnet avail­able on Amazon and found it apt and funny. But when I scis­sored away the text, the image didn’t look good as a header. So I found the jux­ta­posed photos of the two Re­pub­lican pres­i­dents that graces the top of this page elsewhere. . .

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