Numb With Numbers

I got an email this morning at my lovely new AOL address, telling me that my blog was ranked #192 at bookblips.com and that this was a particularly spectacular accomplishment. They congratulated me and everything and told me if I slipped some magic invisible formula into a brand new blog entry, even greater things would happen.

I could never resist invisible. My brother used to write with invisible ink and I always wanted to know what he'd written (nothing good about me, I'm sure). So here goes with the invisible code:



Well, I can see it. Actually it bears a resemblance to an old phone number of mine, but with a different area code and different digits. Now that I think about it, it's not much of a resemblance.
It's been an interesting few days for numbers. The other day the New York Times had an article about bing.com. I hadn't known it existed, but once I saw it did, I scurried right over and looked up "Susan Beth Pfeffer." Hey, it's who I am; it's what I do.

Bing.com had 2,000,000 listings for "Susan Beth Pfeffer." Which bears no resemblance to any phone number I've ever had.

Being an educated consumer, I made haste to my beloved Google to see what the "Susan Beth Pfeffer" number was there. Sadly, it was a mere "about" 92,300.

Now it could be that "about" means 1,907,701, which would give Google one more "Susan Beth Pfeffer" listing than that upstart Bing. Or it could mean Bing loves me a heck of a lot more than Google does (which could explain why even though I sent Google a Valentine's card, it ignored me then and on my birthday, and all the other 363 days of the year. 364 in a leap year).

We'll see what Bing does for my birthday.

Yahoo, by the way, loves me three times as much as Google does ("Susan Beth Pfeffer" is worth 281,000 mentions there), but just a bit more than 10% of Bing. Bing must really adore me, and unlike Scooter, it doesn't purr on my neck at 6 in the morning and bite my toes with madcap abandon.

Speaking of numbers (ha! you thought I was going to speak of Scooter! double ha!!), This World We Live In got its first Amazon ranking number yesterday. Not that I've been checking obsessively, nosireebob. I don't even know when the number came in, because I spent much of yesterday taking my mother to Dr. Doctor for her annual physical (as opposed to her other three visits a year to Dr. Doctor). I found the ranking number after I got back home. It was a robust 271,527. I know because I emailed Marci right away to tell her and she very kindly emailed me back congratulations.

Today, TW's Amazon number is a bit more sickly 393,277, but given that the book isn't going to be published for another 260 days (good thing I have that countdowner, or else I wouldn't know), I'm delighted it has any number at all.

Now if I could just get the numbers in my savings account to go up and on my scale to go down, I'd be a truly happy woman!