Seventh and Eighth Reader!

Two days ago was an historical day in FCN history: we logged our seventh and eighth readers. At first we thought Uncle Wally hadn't checked his counter in a while or his calibration was out of whack; nothing else seemed to explain the readerplosion. On further, CSI type inspection, we discovered that not only was the information accurate, but our two additional readers were from the same general location.

At first, we thought we were receiving a super powerful signal from one computer, but a piece of bailing wire, a toothpick and a watch battery revealed that we were actually the recipient of two distinct signals from the same household or general area.

In the past our readership had increased one reader at a time. A visitor from outerspace joined us and was followed some two and a half months later by one from Zimbabwe. Maybe we're seeing evidence of FCN missionaries carrying FCN tales around like so many honey bees. Or, perhaps, the attractive lifestyle of the derelict is finally seeing its heyday.

We were going to write something really snazzy for our seventh reader, about how seven was the number of perfection and reason and how the number looks like a coiled cobra or a “one” turned backward. We were going to mention that seven is the fourth prime number, second safe prime, second lucky prime, first Woodall prime, third Lucas prime, first Newman -Shanks- Williams prime and fourth factorial prime. We were going to say how ironic it is that seven is both a Carol and Kynea number. We were going to remark that seven both a happy number and self number.

Maybe it's just best we skipped all that; it might have gotten too deep and mathematical.

We couldn't think of anything cool for eight; it's just another even multiple of two that can be divided by four and one. It is, however, one greater than seven, so we are glad to have it instead of its predecessor.

We don't know the names of our two new readers – the Internet is funny like that – but we do know their location – the Internet is, well, funny like that. The map below was generated by our specialized software and is therefore grainy and so zoomed out that the red location glob covers three states. It does, however, tell us that our two new readers are from the heart of the American Midwest and it's always great to see hometown proud Americans on a humor blog run by a passel of left coasters.

But I digress; here's the map:

The occurrence of two singles living so close together that they emit the same signal is so slim that we can practically assume that our two new readers are married.

Since we don't know our reader's names, we are forced to guess. A typical American female name is Jane. A typical American male name is Dick. Dick is, of course, short for Richard and Jane is short for Janeesha.

Since the signal comes from the mid-west (the Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri area), we can infer that our new readers are moral people who regularly model proper citizenship virtues. They rise at 0500 (or at least they checked FCN at 0500) and milk their cows promptly thereafter. They have few vices, but FCN is proud to be one of them.

In short, they are live reenactments of Grant Wood's Gothic American:

At our current rate of growth, our old calculation of 79 million years until we take DailyKos by storm may have been a couple million off. It's looking more like 76,590,928...and counting!

As always, thanks for reading and commenting. With such awesome and active readers, it's almost as if our blog had many more faithful few than it actually does. Almost.