Magic Statistics

This cartoon flap is developing into a major international crisis. Here are a few links to other blogs covering this:

• Muslim World Still Freaking Out Over Danish Cartoons
• Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Arab League Want anti-Cartoon UN Resolution
• Scandinavians warned to leave Gaza
• Islam's Warriors Raid Gaza E.U. Offices over Danish Cartoon Row
• Danish blogs and newspaper websites coming under cyber attack
• Islamic Jihad against blogs
• The Cartoon Jihad Continues

Because the Danish government refuses to apologise for, or impose legal sanctions on, the newspaper that originally published the cartoons, Saudi consumers are calling for a boycott of Danish products. Thus has arisen a new anti-dhimmitude campaign. Last year, it was Free Piglet; now it's Buy Danish. I found this cri de coeur and list of Danish products at Islamophobic:

Support Free Speech! Buy Danish More info: Thou shalt not draw
Wikipedia: Muhammad Drawings

• Arla Foods
• Carlsberg beer
• Danish Bacon
• Danish Breweries
• Danish Crown
• Danish Deli Food
• Danish Food Shop
• Danish Tourist Board
• Visit Copenhagen

Buy more Danish beer. Works for me!

This blog appears to have been caught up in the Cartoon Jihad.

UPDATE (31 Jan.): Michelle Malkin has posted a Danish flag, the 12 offending cartoons, commentary, and links.

On 11 January, I posted a three-sentence blog entry linking to a comic book called Mohammed's Believe It Or Else!. The post also included about a dozen trackbacks, mostly to Brussels Journal, CUANAS, and other sites reporting on the controversy over a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of Mohammed that Muslims deemed insensitive.

There my blog post sat for a week or two. But within the past few days, that little post has received hundreds of hits, mostly from Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, Qatar, etc. According to StatCounter, in the last four days (counting today, which isn't over yet), this blog has received 1694 unique visitors who have loaded 2729 pages. Of the most recent 1100 pageloads, over 679 were loads of that three-sentence post from over two weeks ago. Almost all of these are arriving via the trackbacks at The Brussels Journal.

I've also received a few e-mails suggesting that I need to investigate the facts about the Religion of Peace and stop insulting the prophet. Yet there are other posts on my blog far more critical of (some) Muslims.

Now I see that another of my blog posts has been linked by a blog at MSN spaces saying "Help closing this Islam haters site".

This StatCounter chart shows my hits since 10 January. Today, the final day on the chart, isn’t even over yet.

During the last four days, I‘ve received over 100 hits from United Arab Emirates. I probably had only five visitors from UAE in the previous six months.

UPDATE (31 Jan.): Final tally for yesterday, 30 Jan.: 768 visitors, 1236 pageloads.

Tagged by Rebecca for this meme.

Four Jobs You've Had

• Kid who packed groceries behind the cashier (a job that doesn't exist anymore)
• Teaching assistant
• Statistical computing consultant
• Bank management trainee (what a joke that was!)

Four Places You've Lived

• Pointe-Claire, Quebec
• Vancouver, BC: New Westminster, Burnaby, West End, Kitsilano, & so many other neighbourhoods I can't remember them all
• Seattle, Washington: U District
• Oxford, UK

Four Vacations You've Taken

• Disneyland, California
• Visiting relatives in Toronto
• Anchorage, Alaska
• Britain and Paris

Four Vehicles You've Owned

• Volkswagen Beetle of unknown vintage
• 1982 Mazda GLC
• 2004 Ford Mondeo (actually the rental car we drove around Britain for six weeks—a great car)
• 2003 Toyota Corolla
• Unfortunately, I've never owned, or rented, one of these.

Four Blogs I Want to Tag

• Tom Gilson @ Thinking Christian
• Mike the Geek @ The Waffling Anglican
• John Telfer Brown @ Scotwise
• Foyle @ Verum Serum

Beginning around 1:30 pm yesterday afternoon, there was a major power failure in the southern part of Yukon. My part of Whitehorse had no electricity for over seven hours. Power has apparently been restored to all affected areas, but we are being warned this morning that the situation is not yet back to normal.

[Janice] Patterson [a supervisor of communications with Yukon Energy] says if there is too much demand for power, there would have to be rotating power outages. But she says the energy corporation hopes that can be avoided.

Power outages are not uncommon here; we have two or three a year, most often on very cold winter days. The temperature last night fell to -28C. This is the longest one I can remember, however.

I was working on a couple of blog posts when the power went out. I hope to get them posted this evening.