The Joys of Arbitrary Milestones

I see now looking at the stats for this endeavor called Killed By Fish that I have reached a milestone--I have passed 100,000 pageviews over the life of this blog. Yay for me, right?
Well, yeah. I suppose. Actually, now that I think about it, the number is the fairly arbitrary result of the fact that human beings mostly count in base ten and that figuring in other bases results in a rather unexceptional string of digits. And the whole thing, our modern number system, is the result of having ten digits on our hands, which is probably a frozen accident of evolution. Considering how many people do just fine with fewer digits, ten is probably on the high side of usefulness; the quantity could easily have been less.
And of course there's not really anything that special about the number zero. In fact, through much of human history, it was not even realized that zero was a number, although that certainly opened things up from a conceptual mathematical standpoint.
And you never know--one of these days a bunch of mathematicians could get together for a big conference, take a vote, and decide zero isn't a number anymore.
Still, though, I'm going to pretend it's important, at least for a day or two, and try to ignore the painful fact that I've been getting more hits than ever the past few months despite not having posted a damn thing. I'm sure it doesn't mean anything.
Second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia.
Anyway...apologies, though, for not posting, to anyone who might actually be checking to see if I'm writing anything these days. The answer is "not much." I'm busy, sort of, with a new job conducting political surveys over the telephone with random strangers. It's not hard work, but if there's one thing I've learned about random strangers it's that they often behave in strange, random ways. And some states in this union behave like one big collective jerk. The other day there was one state (I won't name names, let's just call him Arizona) was acting such a jackass I wanted to send it back to the shithole factory.
I'll write about this more, maybe, in days to come. I feel the need to write a parody of the sorts of surveys I conduct, particularly those hideous animals known as push polls. Disguised as a scientific survey, they are actually campaign ads; the questions slam one of the candidates repeatedly, not just to gauge the respondent's reaction to test issues, but to actually sway their opinions, and often done in the most heavy-handed way.

     And if you learned that Candidate B was a farmer who frequently enjoyed carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, would you be MORE LIKELY, or LESS LIKELY, to vote for the pigfucker?

But such is life. Mostly I think of it as reading aloud, which it pretty much is. Better not to think. Better not to think! That approach allows me to do my job without having to face the fact that my idiot country is doomed, doomed to a bleak future of ignorant, unreasoning fear; fear of people who think differently, who put forward dangerous new ideas like math.
Yeah. More later. Shit, there's an off-year election coming up. Doomed. Shit.
My spellchecker has informed me that "pigfucker" is not in dictionary. We'll see about that.