The HitTail List - first count for 2010

It's very annoying when you have an idea for a great post in your head and somewhere during the course of the day it vanishes. Of course, I know I should have written it down before I forgot it, but this time I didn't. Some master post gone for good.

Meanwhile, it's that time again: the checking-up-on-of-the-HitTail-Top-Ten.

Of course there are plenty of old favourites here (sorry, acne treatment reviews hasn't made it yet, for all those who think it should have). In order, they are:

1. athletes hand - sans apostrophe, as you might expect.
2. mike crowl - surprise, surprise - and sans capitals.
3. the great divorce notes - a perennial. One of these days I'm going to put some real notes about the Great Divorce on here.
4. googleads.g.doubleclick.net - a total newcomer, which meant nothing to me. I checked it out on the Net, and it brings up the I'm Feeling Lucky page on Google. Hmm. Can I really have been the end result of so many lucky searches?
5. nintendo jewellery - with jewellery spelt correctly, you'll notice.
6. brent stavig - our old friend whose main claim to fame now seems to be the fact that he turns up on my blog!
7. james berardinelli - considering that I haven't mentioned James' name for some time on here, it's interesting that he still gets on this list.
8. karl maugham - only because I misspelt his name so often.
9. shrinking shirts - a constant problem for people, obviously.
10. athletes fingers - just in case you missed number one on the list.

Those who only made it into the top twenty are a real mixed bunch:

mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com - why would anyone actually search on that?
athlete hand
postile
lesley martin euthanasia
the great divorce chapter summaries
henry lewis gates
here lies eric ambler
religious jeans
crowl
john gray philosopher

I know I've written about all these, but surely other people have too? I'm not going to go further down the list, but Chrissy Popadics only made it to 21st place this time, and how do you pronounce Boise, 22 - and 26 and 28 and at least once in each of the next decades as well. The people of Boise must wonder why the name of their town is such a problem for the rest of the world. Maybe it's time to change it.

A different Top Ten

A few posts past I wrote about the Top Ten search queries that bring up my site according to HitTail.
Curiously enough, the Top Ten on Google Analytics vary somewhat from this.
1. The Great Divorce notes makes it to the top.
2. Athlete's hand comes in second. No great surprises so far.
3. Here Lies Eric Ambler comes in third. It doesn't even appear in the other top ten, though it does turn up further down the list of queries.
4. Karl Maugham - the misspelt version gets to number 4.
5. The Great Divorce chapter summaries comes in at 5. But why? I don't think I've ever written about anything like this. Must be just another version of The Great Divorce.
6. Brent Stavig Starbucks is next. Not sure what Starbucks has to do with it, but there you go, our old friend Brent makes this list too.
7. Diana Crowl music. You won't find any reference to Diana Crowl in my blog. I have no idea who she is, but she keeps causing searchers to find me. Well, she's now in a post, so we'll see how popular we get from that!
8 & 9 are both covered by Nintendo jewellery, but with the two different spellings of the second word.
And lastly at 10 is 'new home ministries' - a total left-field one.

Here Lies Eric Ambler

Finished reading Eric Ambler’s autobiography last night - it’s called Here Lies Eric Ambler. I suspect there may be a bit of a play on the word, lies, in the sense of: is he telling us the whole truth, or has he made his own life into something of a novel?
Be that as it may, it ends rather abruptly just after the second World War, though the introductory chapter is set much later, when he has an accident caused by being overcome by fumes in his car. Perhaps he intended (or even did) write a second volume.
I bought it at a secondhand bookshop somewhere along the road from Cromer to Blakeney; they were having a half-price sale. I thought it might be interesting in terms of what it said about Ambler’s way of writing, but he talks a lot more about his (quite adventurous) life, and the books almost seem to come together by themselves. He mentions some incidents that found their way into the books, and how he tended to change things as he went along and then rewrote and rewrote after he’d finished, but beyond that there isn’t much.
One thing that he makes an emphasis on is his refusal to believe in any sort of God, or to have any sort of faith. That would be fine if he didn’t then set out to make it seem that anyone who does have faith is some sort of fool. Right towards the end, when he’s in the midst of some World War II battle and thinks he’s a goner, he finds himself repeating some words learnt from the past: Into thy hands I commit my spirit. He’s immediately ashamed of himself, and goes on about the foolishness of chaplains in wartime who claim that no man is an atheist in a foxhole. He doesn’t consider that he may be the one who’s wrong, but like so many secularists he can’t see that his point of view isn’t necessarily the correct one.
Coincidentally, in a recent Books and Culture ezine, it mentions Eric Ambler as being a writer of note and one to re-read. I’d like to track down some of them and see what they’re like, and to see if the worldview in them is different to the one he portrays in his autobiography. The editor, John Wilson, writes: Eric Ambler's novel The Intercom Conspiracy (1969), [is] currently out of print, alas, but used copies are readily findable, and there's always the library. Bonus for journalists: an editor is one of the key figures; the newsletter he edits is based in Geneva. It's a brilliant, chilly tale, best read alongside an Ambler novel from thirty years earlier, A Coffin for Dimitrios (UK title: A Mask for Dimitrios), his best-known book. Both feature the character Charles Latimer, a novelist. It's fascinating to see how Ambler's view of espionage and power-politics evolved in the intervening years.