Countermeasure or Die Geister, die ich rief, werd ich nun nicht los Right now I am no.7 for this infamous query in some versions of Google. The number of visitors yesterday was 553. Today I already had 568 and there is one more hour to go. Many webmasters would be happy with a similar "popularity" of their site. I am not. I can't read my referrer logs anymore as they are full of people looking for this one word. And those people never comment on my posts, actually most of the others neither, but still. To stop this I renamed my blog today. The three letter word starting my blog name has been replaced by three letters with each of them separated by a blank coded in a special way in between the letters. I hope in this way Google will realise that my blog is not about that three letter word. On the other hand I am happy that my Google PageRank (can be seen in the toolbar) has risen from 5 to 6 out of a maximum of 10. That is due to the many links I received from outside (thank you to you all) and that is a measure which I still find useful to rate the importance of internet pages.

Results of visitors poll A while ago I asked you the question: "How dear reader did you get here?" Thank you very much for the 61 responses. The results are:

• Via a link on another website: 36.07%
• Had your site in my bookmarks/favourites: 21.31%
• Via a search engine looking for the adult word s**: 14.75%
• None of the above: 13.11%
• Won't tell you: 6.56%
• Don't remember: 3.28%
• Via a search engine searching for other things: 3.28%
• Typed your URL in: 1.64%
• Via an email link: 0.00% I am happy that so many people came via external links or bookmarks/favourites though I am sure that this poll was not representative as I know that in fact most people arriving here look for the word s** which I do not write out anymore in order to get less of those search engine referrers which make the referrer logs almost unreadable and worthless.

I am so vain My comments on G. Marcus half-baked review of Wilco's masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot were noticed by Nate Patrin and Andreas Kellers, thank you so much:

• Hipster Detritus (May 11th): "Remember a few days ago at how I sneered at Greil Marcus for his review of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (almost spelled 'Foxtron'- sounds like Rupert Murdoch's world domination robot)? This guy sneers better."
• Wortmetz: "Und auch Hr. Fritz geizt nicht mit Links. Dazu eine Metarezension, die in einer bissigen Verschränkung der Review von Greil Marcus' im Salon mit seinen Kommentaren einmündet." (sorry for the German quote but I think this is not translatable)

By the way has anybody got an idea how to find out when another site links to you and especially to a post on your blog? I study my referrers via sitemeter and check the links to my site from blogdex and daypop who both crawl the weblogs daily or even more frequently but this is not sufficient exhaustive I feel. Concerning sitemeter I can miss a referrer (only the last 100 are stored) or a link may never be clicked on. Daypop only finds links to blogs which have been added (manually) to its index whereas blogdex somehow finds the weblogs itself though I did not yet understand how, but it is not complete neither. The Google backlinks are not so useful as they are always quite dated (monthly update?) and can not be ordered by date.

Could you tell me something? On Tuesday I had 291 visitors. Unbelievable. I'd like to know more about you. Could you do me the favour of answering this small little poll? Thanks a lot in advance.

The action is at simple things.

Silence #1 "Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness" (André Maurois). The comments are gone. Don't ask me why. I think I am going to move soon.

There is a direction, even if the map's lost (Spin ARG on Giant Sand) In my case it is more like: I have got the key but I can't find the lock. I have been asking myself for a while if I am addicted to the internet. I spend most time online reading weblogs and discussing on music at ILM. According to this interesting article (via troubled diva) a good question to ask is: "First of all, can somebody not accurately predict how much time they're going to spend online, prior to getting online?". Often I set myself a limit of half an hour or one hour and then I break it. So I know of the problem and try counter-measures which don't always work. I feel that my online behaviour is still ok if I look at the ILM statistics page (attention loads very slowly) with my 600 or so posts in about 8 months compared to other people who posted almost 4,000 times in less than 2 years. That is still not a lot compared to a German student in Munich who submitted more than 10,000 posts to a forum in about the same time. I still have a real life. But sometimes when I ask a new question at ILM I can watch myself hitting the reload button twenty or thirty times in a row to see if there are new answers. What a stupid waste of time. I am so bloody impatient. And to be honest these discussions are often not on a very high level and don't always answer the questions. A little bit of a waste of time. So I know that something is going wrong (have the key) but I don't know how to get out of it (find the lock).

Surfin' till the end of the web The Beatles White Album covered by blues musicians I have been linked by Travelers Diagram, "a semi-daily digest/journal/appreciation of art, music, media, and other miracles of creation". They saw Lambchop live the day before yesterday and it was great apparently. Backlinked by Geoff Parkes from Logged Off and by Bellmas. Thank you Tim, Geoff and Armando. And I got an e-mail from Delusions of Adequacy, an Australian zine on independent music and more (Geoff writes for it) if I'd be interested to join their staff and write about Germany. Mmm. I have to think about that one.

The book Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin really intrigues me: "A unique neurologist-Zen Buddhist has written a tome that is a map to all the mysteries of meditation and mind. Take breathing out, for example. We spend just over half of our breathing time exhaling. For meditating monks, it's a full three-quarters. EEGs show us that the act of exhaling helps physically quiet the brain." I just found a website with a Google pagerank of 1. Informa. Bloody hell Andrew, Giovanni, Simon and friends. You have been doing some very efficient online marketing there. ;-( By the way the easiest to find out about the Google pagerank of a website is via the Google toolbar, a small application you can download from the Google site.

Another blogger reads me
Concerning the link business I must thank Phil from Eyes that Can See in the Dark for linking back to me yesterday. I feel almost ashamed about his compliment. And I envy the clever name of his blog so much. Mine on the other hand is so trivial, so idle, so obvious. But it can be interpreted in many ways. It is called s.a.s. as I never write about those two themes (not really but I try to at least). Or the most important things in life (without one of those two there wouldn't be any) are s.a.s. but there is more to life and that is music. Or the truth: I would have killed myself long ago if there would not be s.a.s. in my life. I would feel like a castrated Eskimo in winter.
Coming back to Phil's blog I guess I found it via Josh blog. And it is a very good read. We share a similar taste of music (with exceptions, Ivan Rebroff does not belong to my favourite singers). I just listened to the mp3 Phil posted July 11th which is a collaboration with his friend Scott. A very nice guitar instrumental with some synthesizer, makes me think of new age a little bit, which is not bad. There was this guy Georg Deuter (sorry this is German), who followed the Bhagwan to Poona in India in the late seventies/early eighties, he made similar meditative music.

The name of this blog is totallly random. It could have been called masturbating in the rain or dying in a thunderstorm. Maybe not as Blogspot does not allow such long names I guess. Actually I wanted to write in German and call it Tomaten in Ohren, a pun on Tomaten auf den Augen which translates literally as "tomatoes on the eyes" and is used as a reproach when you do not perceive something apparent because of the red tomato juice which is covering your eyes. I wanted to call it "tomatoes in ears" as I am more the auditive than the visionary (pun intended) kind of guy. And I think there is lots of music which you can only enjoy with tomatoes in your ears.
But I kept getting these 503 error messages so I had to change the name.
But actually THE reason for calling this "sex and sunshine" is that this can be abbreviated to SAS and this stands for at least two totally different things. One of the two can give you a clue about my studies and work. All the above is of course bollocks. I chose sex and sunshine as name for the blog as I hope to attract much more traffic with such a fancy and slightly frivolous title.