Wildlife

inannajones and I went for a short walk last night, down to the Dodder, up and down the banks a bit, and home again. It seems twilight is very definitely the time to see the local wildlife - we watched a bat getting breakfast for about five or ten minutes, flitting up and down one stretch of river, and a few minutes later, we saw a brown rat swimming across. We walked further on, and inannajones remarked that there should now be a third sighting of something less than usual. We stood on the small footbridge at Milltown and looked downriver, and then, hearing louder and louder quacks, turned to look upriver. We turned just in time to see four or five ducks on a firm collision course with us, quacking desperately as they had enough lift to clear the bridge, and probably not enough to clear the humans. So we ducked, too, and they flew on over and down the river, leaving us laughing.

Going to go for more walks at that time of day, I think.

Google Ads

I am fascinated by the odd irony of the google ads on dukestreet.org. Since they're slanted on keywords in the pages, they're almost invariably ads that I'd click on myself - except I'm not allowed to. Google are very very strict about fraudulent clicks, and I've heard of more than a few people who got thrown off the Adsense program because of suspected fraud. Another interesting aspect is that I'm not allowed, on the site itself, to tell people to follow the ad links - the idea is that only natural interest goes through, not people who've been told something like "look at our sponsors' pages!" or whatever the current phrase is. When I get some more content up - the actual essays will start to appear fairly soon, I hope - I'll start working on getting links to the site, and bringing it up in the search engines, and all that fun stuff. It's been a long time since I last ran a site completely myself, and I'm enjoying it.

People you find in strange places

I borrowed Michael Scott's The Hallows from wyvernfriend. She didn't warn me that it contained, close to the end, a description of the very graphic death by lightning strike, on a stage in Wales, of slovobooks. That made me blink.