Tag Archives: Germany

Earthquakes and cougars and bears, oh my!

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We certainly live in interesting times….

I’ve written a couple of times before about the weirdness of cougar (a.k.a. mountain lion) sightings where I live. Last week a cougar was cornered and killed by Chicago police on the North Side. Yesterday everyone was abuzz about the news that another cougar had been sighted early in the morning by a security guard at a large business, as well as by a few other people. Although the Chicago Tribune didn’t specify which large business, I can tell you that it was MPOW. Freaky. No cougar could be found when people went looking for signs of it based on the report, but many people are certain there’s another one out there. I don’t know what to believe. I mean, who would have ever thought one cougar would be found here? Well, that turned out to be true, so it’s not hard to believe there is more than one. But the weirdness doesn’t end there…

Early this a.m. I get an email from my brother who lives near Indianapolis, asking me and another brother who lives in central Illinois if we felt an earthquake. I didn’t but my family in central Illinois sure did. It was the biggest earthquake in the area in 40 years, a 5.2 on the Richter scale. Weird. Now I’ve been in a few earthquakes before, one of which was when living in central Illinois and another time when I was visiting Los Angeles (that was the Northridge quake). But still it is a little weird to have it happen and on such a scale. Later there was a fairly significant aftershock felt throughout the region.

When on a conference call with a colleague in Germany this morning, I was telling him about these strange events. He marvelled about it and then mentioned that something similar had occurred in southern Germany last year, when a wild bear started frequenting urban areas and had to be shot eventually.

Kindertransport

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My thoughts today turn to an acquaintance who is very gravely ill and may not live much longer. Her name is Ines and she has a twin sister, Eva. I’ve known them all my life and also known that they have a rather interesting, and tragic, history. You see, they are survivors of Nazi Germany, Jewish by birth, who were separated from their family when they were only eleven or twelve years old and sent to Great Britain in 1938 or 1939 as part of the Kindertransport (see http://www.Kindertransport.org/ for an excellent history of this rescue operation). As far as I know, they never saw their family again and I assume they were all killed. My Grandma McCallum knew more of their story but this is as much as I know. I don’t recall Eva or Ines ever talking about this experience, at least, not when I was around.

They are really special people and I fondly remember staying with them a few times over the years when attending what we called “special meetings” (basically, a Bible conference held over a three-day period, usually Friday to Sunday) in New York. For a number of years, Ines worked in the World Trade Center. In spite of what they had been through, I don’t ever recall them being downhearted. They were always cheerful and full of hospitality to others.

Last year I watched a moving documentary of the Kindertransport, called Into the Arms of Strangers (see http://www2.warnerbros.com/intothearmsofstrangers/), which was presented with an Oscar for best documentary film in 2000 or 2001. I encourage anyone who doesn’t know about this part of recent history to look it up in your local library and to watch it.

Blog visitors: some interesting facts and figures [Updated]

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I’ve been using Google Analytics since mid-November 2005 to gain some knowledge about who visits this blog, how much traffic it generates, and from where. It’s not a perfect tool but hey, it’s free and it’s easy to use. I’ve read that others question the results given to them by Google Analytics and I think it is a good policy to try to track usage in more than one way (e.g. by adding in analysis of server logs, depending on whether your ISP provides access to that kind of information).

It’s now been about two months since I put in place the necessary tracking code. Here are some interesting facts and figures that I’ve come up with so far:

  • the site averages about 21 visitors each day (interestingly, that corresponds exactly to the number of subscribers it has on Bloglines)
  • about 37% of visitors are recurring and 63% of them are new during that two month timeframe
  • visitors come from all over the world, including (as far as I can tell) the following countries: the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Spain, France, Israel, Hungary, and Poland.
  • visitors find their way here mainly via Google, Technorati, or by entering the URL to this site (what Google Analytics terms ‘direct’)

I have seen steady growth in access these last few months. The traffic this site gets (and therefore its ‘impact’) is quite low, but that’s fine with me. It’s just kind of fun to know a bit about visitors, especially where they come from.

[Update: For reasons I don't quite understand yet, I discovered this a.m. that if I look at Google Analytics results for this site on a weekly basis, I get different results than if I choose to view the results for the complete length of time I have had Google Analytics running (approximately since mid-November 2005). The above statistics are derived from a two month summary rather than from analyzing results week by week. One major difference is the fact that a much larger number of countries are sources for visitors to this site than I had previously believed. These include China, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Romania, Italy, Netherlands, India, Vietnam, Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Thailand, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and Czech Republic. I think this is pretty incredible geographic coverage for a very low traffic, English language site, and it gives real meaning to WORLD Wide Web.]