- by Owen Morton
I’m guessing this will be the last article of the year, because I’m busy tomorrow, and going to work on Monday and Tuesday (then going out to get plastered on Tuesday night, which will be fun, but unfortunately not conducive to writing website articles), so I thought I’d end the year with a little look back at everything that’s come and gone this year on Heath the Rat’s Silly Page. I’m going to include statistics on various exciting things. I bet you just can’t wait.
We started the year with a review of Jim Hedgehog’s Supernatural Christmas, a book which will forever live in infamy, and if you discount this current article, the last article of the year was the one about Big Mouth Billy Bass. We journeyed between these two subjects by way of such articles as the story about the life of the concrete block, a review of the seminal Ice Cream Technology – Its Use and Abuse, a discussion about where Angel’s legs are, and quite hideous amounts of He-Man. I don’t think there’s any noticeable deterioration (or, sadly, improvement) in standards of subjects for articles here. As it happens, I’m actually fairly happy with how the website’s gone this year, apart, of course, from the month and a half gap in July and August when nothing was done at all.
I can’t really make many excuses for that, actually. A lot of the website’s work over the year has been done while I’ve been at York, and after the article on (I think) 27th June, I came back to Nottingham for a three month holiday. While on holiday, I tend to do more work than I do at uni, because working in Nottingham library for money tends to mean they want you to actually work, otherwise they fire you. Therefore, at York, I didn’t do so much work, thus had more time to waste writing stupid discussions about stupid things, but when I came back to Nottingham, I tended to be too tired in the evenings to do anything much. (In my defence, the Blue Mairpus article which actually appeared in October was finished on 10th July, but I totally forgot about it, and didn’t upload it for three months. So if I had remembered, there would have been one article in July.)
Heath the Rat’s Silly Page reached its first birthday on 30th March, which I felt was a particularly impressive achievement. Sadly, no one else did. Still, I celebrated it by designing a brand new look for the page, which received very few comments, and those that it did receive were of complaint, so eventually I redesigned it and brought it closer to how it had been before. No one at all has commented on this, so I’m guessing they think it’s okay. (To be quite honest, I don’t know how many people look at this website on anything approaching a regular basis.)
Something which puzzled me quite intensely was the influx of American visitors to the site in June. This was really strange, actually: in the space of one week I gained about fifteen entries to my guestbook which were obviously by people who I don’t know, and most of whom were quite clearly American. I figured out eventually that Heath the Rat’s Silly Page had been mentioned on x-entertainment.com, from which loads of people came over to have a look. The funny thing was, as far as I can tell, they never came back. Odd, that.
As far as I’m concerned, Heath the Rat’s Silly Page has never had any particular direction. It’s only a device to attempt to make people laugh (and occasionally air my views on politics, religion and society, but I’m sure you’ve learnt to steer clear of any paragraphs about those subjects which seem like they’re getting a little too intense – and such paragraphs show up in the most unusual places, like in reviews of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles episodes), and I hope I’ve succeeded in this aim this year.
Now for the promised statistics. We’re going to start by counting the number of articles that have appeared on the website this year, and analyse various important facts about them.
January: 6 articles
February: 9 articles
March: 4 articles
April: 5 articles
May: 5 articles
June: 8 articles
July: 0 articles
August: 2 articles
September: 7 articles
October: 8 articles
November: 5 articles
December: 10 articles (counting this one)
Total: 69 articles
The most prolific month was December, and I suspect that it would have been more prolific still if I hadn’t come home on the 16th and started working in the library again, thus squeezing out the opportunity to write a lot of gibberish. Okay, the week from the 9th to the 15th wasn’t particularly active, but that was because I had an essay to write.
Okay, let’s do some detailed statistical analysis. Firstly, we’ll see how many of those articles were written by me. The answer is 65. That means that 94.202898550724637681159420289855 percent (to quote my computer’s calculator) of the articles were written by me. Can we see some more input from everyone else next year please? (Thanks to Peter McDonald and David King, by the way, for their contributions.)
The next, and possibly more important question, is how many of the articles concern He-Man in some way, shape or form, and from that we’ll be able to see just how obsessed I am. The answer is 17 out of 69 articles are about He-Man. This is 24.6 percent (I’ve rounded the answer nicely this time), meaning that just under a quarter of the things I’ve written about have been about He-Man. Oh my god.
These statistics are beginning to depress me now, so I’ll finish now and take the opportunity to wish you all a happy new year (in the event that you’re not one of the people who I’ll see on Tuesday when we go out, which – given the numbers which I suspect the readership of this website consists – I rather doubt).
See you at Heath the Rat’s Silly Page in 2003! xx