The Tell-Tale Heart.  This week marks one-third of the way through the project; mathematically I guess the true 1/3 point is 1/3 through Week 18, but since under my interpretation of the edict I can skip a week or two and can avail myself of the Merle Haggard option, I don’t have to do my math based entirely on a denominator of 52. 

I was thinking last week I’d declare a hiatus, maybe for the rest of the summer, maybe forever, but I think I’ll just coast week-to-week through some songs in the vault instead and stop doing elaborate videos, as I’d planned to do (or stop doing) back in Week 10 anyway.  I’m getting busy at work, the kids are out of school, we’re doing a little bit of traveling this summer, interest (yours and mine) is flagging for the nutcracker, and I have to crank up the opera Mel and I are writing.  I’ll plan to get to the halfway point—Week 26—and see how it looks from there.  I’ve already got enough songs to finish out the year, so I’ve kind of proved my point, I guess, but maybe part of the point is also actually seeing it through, not just seeing that it’s possible.  I have a habit of not doing things that are possible, or doing a thing only up to the point that I see that the thing is possible, figuring that once the end is in sight, why bother?  If it’s possible, it’s not really necessary to go through with it, by my reasoning.  Which is to say I am easily bored and don’t get much done.

I forgot to tell you:  Mel asked me to help him write an opera.  He asked me to do the libretto.  I had to look up that word.  After looking it up I still didn’t really know what it means.  A libretto, it turns out, is songs that don’t rhyme.  So I’m the perfect candidate.  (That’s one clue toward figuring out whether a particular one of my songs is supposed to be funny, by the way:  My intentionally funny songs always rhyme.) 

The opera’s based on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which is what the opera teacher suggested to Mel.  Mel, who I wrote about in Week 2 and whose mother was my seventh grade English teacher, is a professor of music composition at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.  Having familiarized himself with the nutcracker project, he didn’t ask me to help with the music.  He came down and stayed with us Sunday night and learned a lot about Star Wars and Mars Mission Legos, which we might put in the opera.  The opera, assuming we get it done (and neither of us is particularly known for getting stuff done, especially things that are possible) will premiere in Monroe in April next year.  The opera season in Monroe, Louisiana, is notoriously short, so reserve your tickets now.

Crosstimbers.  The song is another of the wedding songs gone wrong.  I originally recorded it back before Christmas but re-did it this weekend.  I don’t know that it’s really an improvement over the first recording, but somehow it came out thirty seconds shorter this time.  I thought maybe I’d left something out, but I guess I just played it faster this time.  I picked the song for this week in particular because BRAZOS was one of the answers in the New York Times Saturday crossword this weekend, and this song is mainly about the Brazos River.  It’s also one of the ones featuring cruelty to turtles, though it’s only implied in this case and takes place off-screen.  I can’t say, however, that no turtles were harmed in the making of this song.  [I just listened to the video for the first time, and I don’t know what Youtube’s processing did to the sound to make that windy buzzing noise (the one that’s not attributable to me, I mean.)  That’s not in my recording.  Sorry about that.]

“Cross Timbers,” according to Wikipedia, is the name given to “a fairly narrow strip of land in the United States that runs from southeastern Kansas across Central Oklahoma to Central Texas.  Made up of a mix of prairie, savanna, and woodland, it forms part of the boundary between the more heavily forested eastern part of the country and the almost treeless Great Plains, and also marks the western habitat limit of many mammals and insects.”

 In seventh grade Texas history we learned we lived in the western crosstimbers region (I like it better as one word because it seems more biblical that way,) and then nobody ever used the word again except me and a friend of mine when we were acting goofy—I still call him sometimes and ask him how things are in the crosstimbers.  But you’ll never really hear anybody say, “We’re heading up to Graham this weekend,” and have somebody say, “Where’s Graham?” and have the first person respond, “It’s a little town up in the crosstimbers eco-region.”  Nobody uses the word.  People might tell you’re they’re travelling to the gulf coast, the hill country, the Big Bend, the piney woods and even the caprock, but they’ll never say they’re going to the crosstimbers.  But people do go there, and people are from there.  I’m one of those mammals and insects.

Inventory and Stats

Solely for my own benefit (as if the rest of this were for anybody else’s), in case I make it through this thing all the way to the end, I want to take a snapshot of where things stand as far as the view-count for the first 16 videos, according to Youtube, so I can compare it with various points in the future:

Week                     Song                                                                      View-Count

Week 1:               Third Amendment Blues                               457        
Week2:                Yahtzee!                                                              134
Week3:                My Facebook Page                                          633
Week 4:               In Our Neighborhood                                    111
Week 5:               87 Kinds of Shaving Cream                           75
Week 6:               I’m Not Kenny Rogers                                     95
Week 7:               Piper’s Holiday/Loch Lomond                   160
Week 8:               Before the Lord Found Me                             98
Week 9:               Grandpa, Don’t Eat the Gravy                       67
Week 10:             Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town       65
Week 11:             Bigfoot Song                                                         62
Week 12:             Pocket Mouse Moon                                         61
Week 13:             Miracle on the Hudson                                  216
Week 14:             Son of Strawberry Roan                                   51
Week 15:             Hey, Everybody, I Bought a Banjo              46
Week 16:             No Proof                                                                 23

A few observations:

Four of the videos have inflated numbers due to having been linked or embedded (with my gratitude) by (i) SethG when filling in for Rex Parker at Rex’s NYT crossword puzzle blog (Week 1), (ii) Fussy in her continuing blog gig at the San Francisco Chronicle (Week 3 and Week 13) and (iii) various blogs in Scotland who reported on my father-in-law’s death (Week 7).  The “My Facebook Page” video uptick was especially dramatic, because it happened several weeks after the video’s premiere.  It had been at 197 for several weeks, and one day I suddenly noticed it going crazy.  So Fussy is responsible for 440 of the views of that one, as well as a big chunk of “Miracle on the Hudson.”   “Piper’s Holiday” might have continued getting views but I removed it from public view after a week or so.

The average view-count, omitting Weeks 1, 7 and 13, and using the pre-Fussy number of 197 for “My Facebook Page,” is 83. 

It’s obvious that the viewcount (i) after Week 8 took a big dip from the 100-range down into the 60’s range, where it remained pretty constant for 4 weeks, and (ii) that the past three weeks have been especially low and dropping lower. 

As for the first finding, I think that was when Facebook went to its new format—i.e., since Facebook is the only way I advertise these things (other than an occasional retail sales job to somebody I think might be particularly interested), my message got seriously diluted by that change in format.  As for the second, I attribute it to less intensive PR efforts, summer doldrums, and my not being as interesting as I think I am. 

Also, some of those numbers for early videos are inflated by my having viewed them multiple times, or at least being “credited” with viewing them by my various embed attempts, etc., plus the kids watching them.  Several weeks ago—I’m not sure when—I resolved not to be responsible for more than one viewing per video so that I can get a purer reading of the view-counts, which means I have to be very careful in setting preferences and embedding, etc. (hard to explain, but sometimes you have to go to the “play” screen instead of the editing screen in Youtube to work on the video, which means it counts as a view.)

You’re not really still reading this, are you?

I’m not really fixated on the view-count anymore.  I was at the beginning.  There are a handful of people who tune in pretty regularly, and they’re not doing it because the songs are any good, I’m sure.  They’re doing it because they’re friends.  Or because they’re the kind of people who rubberneck at car wrecks.

My site-views, by the way, are much higher than the Youtube views indicate, which means one or more of the following things:  (i) Youtube is wrong, (ii) my site statistics are wrong, (iii) people are coming to my site but not watching the videos or (iv) I don’t know how to interpret my site statistics.  The fourth is certainly correct, but the third might also be true:  I get a lot of hits from Russians looking for stuff about the nutcracker ballet, I think.  If anybody reading knows how to say “I’m sorry” in Russian, let me know.  Or “thank you” in Sri Lankan.  God only knows what they’re doing here.