Right, I'm off to Boston for a few days. That's not Boston in Lancashire, but Boston in Yankashire. Hey, I should get my own county, I could call it Anchorshire. Or Hughfolk. Or something like that.

Anyway, thanks for everyone who wrote in with the correct answer to the lolly stick joke (it was (a), by the way). You win... the knowledge that you had nothing better to do with your time than to write in and tell me something that I already knew. Cheers.

I'm sure that there was something vitally important that I was going to write here, but I can't remember what it was. Such is life. It's been nearly a year since I crossed the ocean to Yankashire, so expect some stats on this later. And a challenge for any programmers out there: like some kind of anal-retentive freak, I keep all my email, and also all my procmail logs. I would like to bore everyone who reads this by doing some analysis of these logs, but I can't find anything that will analyze procmail logs. I guess what I want is something like those web analyzers, that tells you stuff like how many hits I got per day, who sent me the most messages, who sent the largest messages, that kind of stuff. Probably a whizz to do in Perl, and perhaps someone has already done it, but these days I'm getting too lazy to google, it's quicker to type queries in natural language on this thing and let someone else go out and look for the answers for you...

Talking of logs, I am well aware that the servustats site, which is doing my hit counting and search term scraping goes up and down like, as the phrase has it, a whore's yo-yo. Still, I prefer things that way, since it means that when my hit count seems pathetically low, I can just blame it on servustats being down. I probably miss the odd hilarious google search term that brought people here, but so what?

Also, since I'm too lazy to email people anymore, is the "Angel" who posted in the comments on the webpage about the Soup Dalek linked to in this week's NTK the Angel who knows Bex through DC? Because if so, then... actually, I can't think of any consequences if this is the case.

OK, in the absence of any real email stats, some made up stats.

This week I have:

• Won a total of $95million in 12 lotteries that I didn't enter (although I'm not supposed to tell anyone about it yet, since there are few technical issues to work out first)
  
• Been offered to help various relations of 23 deposed, murdered or naturally expired people shift a grand total of $135million dollars.
  
• Been told about about 7 boys whose parents found $10,000 dollars in their closet
  
• Been offered a variety of products, natural, unnatural and pump-based, which could enhance my manhood by a grand total of 4 foot 6.
  
• Had 3 secret admirers reveal their lust for me, if only I go to some dodgy website, enter my email address and download a dodgy .exe file which will try to get my modem to call a number in Ljubljana.
  

I think that covers everything. Ah yes, as jbs once said (but he doesn't have a weblog, so I can pinch his lines with near impunity), "Somewhere out there, there's some bloke with $25 million dollars sitting in a bank account that he can't shift, and he can't work out why".

And lastly, something I've been meaning to link to for an incredibly long time but never remembered to. From dave, who brought you "Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?", comes A New Kind of Scientist. It's number two on google for this phrase, but I don't know if that means anything.