The Russians are Coming but the Hummingbirds Aren’t

If you blog and look at your stats from time to time you might notice, as I have, that your blog gets some of its audience coming from Russia. For example this morning I checked my stats page and for this month of the ten countries listed 4,555 unique views came from America, 912 from Russia and 556 from Canada. And my all-time view count puts it at 465,330 from America, 26,453 from Canada, 24,674 from Russia and so on down the line of ten countries for a grant total of 618,735 views on the Misadventures of Widowhood blog since I started it in 2012. 

This morning I had an epiphany, or some might say I formed a conspiracy theory about why the Russians are checking out a little widow’s blog like mine. What do you think? Is the KBG---or whatever they call their Central Intelligence Agency these days---looking for insight into the minds of Americans to help them in their efforts to weaponize social media? Or do you think another explanation I found online makes more sense...that some schools in Russia assign students trying to learn English to read American blogs? Ya and Irish fairies will leave us all pots of gold with tomorrow's morning mist.

Being a bored woman with a job list full of things I didn’t want to do I decided to turn the tables and read some blogs written by Russians. I found a list of the supposed ten best blogs from Russia. One was described like this: “The Moscow Diaries is written by the quintessential rootless cosmopolitan, an estranged Jewish-Russian emigre who returned to Moscow as an Americanized journalist to preach the Western gospel to the aborigines. Though sometimes fact-challenged, she writes well and knows how to get published.” Another blog named Poemless was described as “a neo-Stalinist Manta Ray of political analysis, erm, I mean a liberal Chicago intellectual with an entertainingly idiosyncratic take on Russian (and American) politics, culture, literature, feminism, etc. On the downside, the posts are too long and you should be very careful about describing the color of her blog theme (its red).” 

That blog list was old and not all the links work and I was having trouble finding a more current list of popular personal Russian blogs. But after a little digging I discovered why. According to a 2014 Slade article Putin had just made anonymous blogging against the law in Russia. “The law applies to any blog written in Russian for Russians; a post you write from a Brooklyn cafe could face censorship from Moscow. Bloggers will also be held liable for any alleged misinformation they publish, even in comments written by somebody else. And, insult to injury," Slate continued, "bloggers aren’t even allowed to use profanity; a single naughty word would put them in violation of the law. Failure to comply results in a $280 to $1,400 fine as well as a ban on your blog.” Well, damn, hell and the F word! Maybe the Russians are just reading our American personal blogs for the thrill of finding an occasional swear word. 

The best explanation I’ve found for the Russian traffic on our blogs is that it’s coming from spam bots aka content farms that are designed to satisfy certain algorithms to auto post low quality ads/spam and they are landing on personal blogs by mistake. But of course that doesn’t fit with the current conspiracy I’m trying to spin. The only unanswered question in my tin-fold covered head would be, “Are we being watched for nefarious or innocent reasons?” Yes, you guessed it, as a woman who in recent years wrote my own, twenty-five page long spoof obituary where I “confessed” to being a secret operative in the CIA, I’m leaning towards believing my initial conspiracy theory rather than the common sense explanations about the spam bots. Why? Because my imagination and creative juices need exercise and I couldn’t find anything else to write about today. 

On the off chance that some Russian really is sitting around using a Tor router to bypass censorship to find out what an anonymous widow is doing on a rainy morning in America, I hope you don’t die of boredom when you learn that I’ve been using half my allotted writing time to stare out the window at my "container farm” on the deck. It consists of two tomatoes, a mint and a basil plant for me and twelve lettuce plants for the wild rabbits. I have two new hummingbird feeders out there that they will probably ignore like all the others I’ve tried. I can see the tiny birds in the white pine trees twenty feet from my window but I can’t get them to come any closer no matter what plant or feeder I use year after year to lure them in. If you have any tips to solve my problem please share. On the other hand, Google says of the 337 species of hummingbirds world-wide Russia only has one and we have two dozen, so maybe some of my American readers should be giving your guys (and me) the advice. We love our hummingbirds on this side of the iron curtain! ©

Photo above © Lewis Feldkamp. It's of the three inch, Ruby-Throated Hummingbird species like I see in my pine trees. I'm guessing the pine sap is a higher value food to them than what I've been offering. Good theory or am I doing something else wrong?