Friday, February 14, 2003 HUBRIS Arrogant pride or presumption. Defiance of the gods. We are given, here at Mango Pudding Blues, to outbursts of hubris that lead, as we have learned, inevitably to nemesis. Divine retribution, you know. Case in point; after demanding performance improvements from you, our site statistics engine vanished. “Ooops,” our service provider told us, “your, uh, bronze account doesn’t include statistics.” And so we have no idea whether you have doubled our readership or not. None. For all we know, you all just left in a huff and now we’re sitting here all alone. Case two; a couple of days after bragging about our sole and goat cheese dinner, we put too much juniper-berry dry rub on our salmon last night and rendered it nearly inedible. * * * Thursday, February 13, 2003 THE NEW GLASSES The new glasses should be pure geometrical rectangles bound with ultralightweight titanium wires. The new glasses should make me look like I’m from the future. From Germany in the future. * * * Wednesday, February 12, 2003 FOOD Last night? Last night it was pan-fried sole with a white wine and caper sauce, served with a simple salad of red pepper and leaf lettuce with a goat cheese and buttermilk dressing. The wine was Cave Spring’s dry riesling, from right here in Ontario (Australian Wolf Blass on Canadian wines: “They make a nice riesling. The rest, forget it.”). And, looking ahead this week, the menu for our traditional Valentine’s Day fondue has almost been set: a lobster and brie fondue with scallops, shrimp, breadsticks and bread for dipping, followed by dessert from Three Tarts, our favorite bakery here. Still need to come up with a salad, I think. Or maybe we’ll just order pizza. * * * Tuesday, February 11, 2003 LISTING QUERIES, SORTED BY THE NUMBER OF REQUESTS A slice provided verbatim from our new-ish back end reporting system. This shows, presumably, the search terms that landed the seekers on Mango Pudding Blues in a given period. reqs: search term ----: ----------- 21: mango pudding blues 14: mango pudding 3: mango pudding recipe 2: lou reed the raven 1: devdas movie audio sample 1: zal yanovsky 1: photos de boutiques mango 1: walker soundtrack photos strummer 1: foxy old ladies 1: mango pudding blues 3.0 1: story ejaculate cup 1: joe strummer trash city We have long suspected that we were gathering unexpected visitors who came looking for mango pudding recipies, but never in our wildest dreams did we think that we would score on “foxy old ladies” as a search term. In fact, we don’t think we’ve used the words “foxy” or “ladies” ever on this site. Have we? * * *