I have plopped a couple of new items in the sidebar for our mutual entertainment (okay, mostly for mine).

The first is a little waving flag of Papua New Guinea. Since PNG is my adopted land, and where I prefer to live, it seems appropriate to show a little pride. So, let it wave jauntily. It doesn’t take up much space.

The other item is a little world map that shows the location of the last one-hundred visitors.

I find this one fascinating. I know of a few hardy souls who read Madang – Ples Bilong Mi regularly, but I was blown away when I saw the distribution of readers on the world map. I have no idea of how they found the site. It must have been intense Googling.

Here’s a screenshot of today’s red speckles (click on the world map in the sidebar to get this page): 

Here are a few that I discovered today by clicking on the world map and then the little flags: Pretoria, Manila, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Dubai, Jordan, Bratislava, Columbia, Lima (Peru, not Ohio), São Paulo, Tsukuba in Japan, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Hmmmm . . . Do I know anyone in Ulaanbaatar? Nope, don’t think so.

Who are these people and what amuses them? Why do so few leave comments. I’d love to hear what they think about Madang and the things that they see on this site.

Think of baking millions and millions of delicious oatmeal raisin cookies and scattering them at random around the world. Who would ignore them? Who would eat them? Would they like the taste? Would the baker wonder about these things? His job being done (baking and offering), would the baker care?

An author gets paid to write a book. It’s a job. Does the author really care who reads it as long as the publisher sells it in sufficient numbers so that they will want the author to write another one?

What about people who enjoy writing but have no audience. The internet has changed the world for them. It has provided an audience. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of ‘stuff’ that I have written over decades – mostly short stories and poetry. Someday I’m going to start unloading them on you. The point I’m making is that for people like me – writers who do it for the love of it – we can be pretty sure that, sooner or later, somebody is going to actually read what we write. This creates a completely different emotional situation. The emotions are mixed. There is simultaneous elation and fear.

There is something ethereal about writing stuff and then just throwing it out among the vast internet billions. It makes me think of a poet in a space capsule who writes for himself to pass the hours, but daily tosses out a fistful of pages and lets them settle to earth wherever they might fall.

Not that I’m a poet. I’m more of a baker.