From the Archives: "Schoolhouse Rock vs. Public Schoolhouse Rock"

Every Friday, I get an e-mail from SiteMeter.com which provides me with some stats on the total number of visits to my blog, the average number of visits per day, the average length of a visit this week, the number of visitors today, the number of visits this week, the number of page views, the number of page views per visit this week and a host of other data. Among the other items are what I find most interesting: referral data and domain names from where these visitors arrived at my site. Sometimes, when time permits, I'll look at where my viewers are coming from, what search terms they used to find my blog on a search engine or other site, etc. I even know what kind of computer (PC or Mac) and broswer (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, etc.) they're using.

Sometimes, I get details I DON'T really need but is still interesting; for example, I know that a viewer from somewhere around Kelowna, British Columbia (that's in Canada for my geographically-challenged readers) visited a POST I did last March about the artificial pancreas being featured on the TV show "The Doctors" and they clicked on the photo I included on that post of the soap-opera star looking Dr. Stork in his "The Bachelor" days (circa 2006) as well as in his scrubs for "The Doctors" today, perhaps to download the photo or have a look at it enlarged. Someone else in or around Washington, DC looked at the same post (making me wonder if they saw it someplace else, or read about it online someplace), but they did not click on the photo, but they did stay on the page for 12 minutes and 57 seconds, probably to watch the full clips that I included in the post; they exited on "The Doctors" website, perhaps to see if there was anything else there of interest.

Generally, I suspect that the visits from places like Russia, China and Taiwan and other places that do not even use the Roman alphabet are highly likely to be spammers and I'm always curious where they come from, but since I don't publish my contact info. online (which is by design), I really don't get an excessive amount of spam. I also have the ability to check domain names where people are viewing my site from, so I can see when someone is visiting me from a computer at a big pharma company, I know it. Ditto for medical device companies. I get a few of hits from Bagsværd, Denmark, so I know at least a few people at Novo Nordisk and/or their employees are watching what I'm doing, but they may not have realized that I KNOW when they're watching, and what posts they are visiting! In the U.S., working from home via VPN access seems to be fairly common, so I may not know when a drug company person is viewing my site as they work from home, but the analytics aren't too bad for my purposes. Mobile access to my site is less clear, but most of the traffic is not from Smart Phones anyway.

Sometimes I view the link(s) that brought people to my blog, and recently, someone else from Washington DC (I guess it could be the same viewer) actually viewed my archives from October 2007 (visit HERE, or select from the archives drop-down window in the right margin of my blog and select by date from there). From there, I found a post I found without any broken links (the comment is a different story), working videos, etc. that I posted back on October 2007 which still brought a smile to my face when I looked at it again today. Hence my post for today!

The original post can be found HERE, but I simply copied the content and am re-sharing it again today. Have a look:


Schoolhouse Rock vs. Public Schoolhouse Rock

Today's post is a bit out of character for me (George Simmons of The B.A.D. Blog is better known for his weekly YouTube postings), but perhaps when you have a look, you may see my logic here.

Last night, I was watching the news and there was another story about yet another local school district trying to introduce "healthier" snack options by replacing sodas with (and the logic escapes me here) juice, which often contains as many calories and as much sugar as the so-called unhealthy beverages they are supposed to be replacing.

Bottled water IS healthier, but replacing sodas with juices that are often loaded with high-fructose corn syrup and other crap make the newly chosen beverages no better than the sodas which have been banned by many school districts across the country. I'm sorry, but if you're going to making these moves in the name of health, make sure we aren't just villanizing soda, then replacing it with another form of junk food with a nicer label. In addition, the food included in many public school lunches is equally bad (if not worse), yet entirely sanctioned by the USDA and the FDA. Shame on us! A better bet is to pack our kid's lunches ourselves!

Like many kids who grew up in the 1970's, I tend to view Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons with a sense of nostalgia. As Wikipedia notes, these educational cartoon shorts have become cultural icons, so much that they have been parodied on other television shows, including the likes of Saturday Night Live, MadTV and The Simpsons. It is for that reason I thought it might be appropriate to include clips from the original, followed by MadTV's parody, "Public School House Rock" to make my point. Watch them and see if you agree.

First, the original:
Followed by the MadTV version: