Minimalist poet, minimalist lifestyle

A teddy bear has been implicated in 2,500 deaths — trout deaths, that is.
State officials say a teddy bear that fell into a pool at a Fish and Game Department hatchery earlier this month clogged a drain. The clog blocked the flow of oxygen to the pool and suffocated the fish.
Hatcheries supervisor Robert Fawcett said the bear, dressed in yellow raincoat and hat, is believed to be the first stuffed toy to cause fatalities at the facility.
"We've had pipes get clogged, but it's usually with more naturally occurring things like a frog or even a dead muskrat," he said. "This one turned out to be a teddy bear and we don't know how it got there."
The deaths prompted Fawcett to release a written warning: "RELEASE OF ANY TEDDY BEARS into the fish hatchery water IS NOT PERMITTED."
He said it's not known who dropped the bear, but urged anyone whose bear ends up in a hatchery pool to find a worker to remove it. "They might save your teddy bear, and keep it from becoming a killer," he said.

According to my stats on StatCounter, in November I had a record number of visitors to my blog - the figures for Sitemeter are a bit lower because two days of data were lost. Approximately four thousand people now click onto this blog every month, which is about a tenfold increase since I first installed the stats packages nearly two years ago.

Just who are the people who visit me then? Well, it seems that about fifty percent are UK based with another thirty percent in the rest of the Anglosphere, with the remaining twenty percent from the other parts of the world. Not quite truly international - but not too parochial either.

Until October, unlike the publicly-accessible stats for the majority of blogs that I regularly view, I never seemed to experience any spikes in readership; but then that changed, when I suppose someone put a link to the blog. Unfortunately, because I can't access the full features provided by either StatCounter or Sitemeter I can't track down this link, but I do know that for about a day and a half I was getting a lot of visitors from Canada looking at my archives for October 2006, and it seems that these same archives have recently been accessed from quite a few people in California.

Another spike occurred in the middle of November, when the same person, based in the UK, visited about two hundred of my pages over the period of two days.

This is supposedly a translation of a clipping from a German newspaper:

"In retrospect, I admit it was unwise to try to gain access to my house via the cat flap," Gregor Knopf admitted to reporters in Bremen, Germany. "I suppose that's the reason they're called cat flaps, rather than human flaps, is because they're too small for people, and perhaps I should have realised that."
Knopf (41), a gardener from Bremen, was relating how he had become trapped in his own front door for 2 days, after losing his house keys. "I got my head and shoulders through the flap but became trapped fast around the waist. At first, it all seemed rather amusing, I sang songs and told myself jokes. But then I wanted to go to the lavatory. I began shouting for help, but my head was in the hallway so my screams were muffled."
"After a few hours, a group of students approached me but, instead of helping, they removed my trousers and pants, painted my buttocks bright blue, and stuck a daffodil between my cheeks. Then they placed a sign next to me which said: 'Germany resurgent, an essay in street art. Please give generously' and left me there. People were passing by and, when I asked for help, they just said 'Very good! Very clever!' and threw coins into my trousers." "No one tried to free me. In fact, I only got free after two days because a dog started licking my private parts and an old woman complained to the police. The rescue services came and cut me out, but the police arrested me as soon as I was free. Luckily, they've now dropped the charges, and I collected over DM3,000 in my underpants, so the time wasn't entirely wasted."