Category → By The Numbers
Okay, Who’s Huffing Vicks VapoRub?
From the back end of this blog. What are you people doing out there? Credit: DJ Kroll
One of the fun things about having a blog is the traffic analytics feature on the dashboard of WordPress (although I really miss the features of SiteMeter that don’t run on WordPress because it doesn’t accept JavaScript. But I digress.)
Besides the addictive nature of looking at one’s traffic numbers, I always find it interesting to look at the search terms that bring people to our humble little corner of GlobCasino. I became hooked on this way back when I started the original version of Terra Sig on Blogger: in February 2006, I had an unusual spike in traffic originating from the UK via the search term “terra sigillata.” So, I posted this and learned this.
Usually, search term hits tell me that something has come up in the news. But, alas, I cannot find anything recent that would account for Vicks VapoRub to elicit much searching. Perhaps telling is that all 27 searches came via a misspelled search for “vicks vapor rub.”
North Carolina historical marker in Greensboro. Credit: DJ Kroll
(By the way, the search term brought folks here to read this post I wrote on Vicks VapoRub after a 2011 PR snafu with journalists like Ivan Oransky at Reuters Health. I ended up writing a bit more about the North Carolina pharmacy history that brought the world this lovely concoction.)
I do know that misguided youth will huff volatile chemicals for the acute high one might get. Vicks is most commonly used to enhance the experience of MDMA (ecstasy) – I’ve seen kids at raves wearing N95 facemasks inside which they have smeared the VapoRub.
So, what’s with you people wanting to know about Vicks VapoRub?
Top 10 most-read posts of July
David's Top 10 Reasons You Read This Blog in July. Credit: Pete Souza/Wikimedia Commons
Being a scientist and writer of a science blog, one can’t help being mesmerized by the statistics behind one’s readership. Over the last five years I’ve been quite surprised to see what posts garner a large number of readers and comments and which ones don’t (more often those that take a lot of time to write).
As posts gain traction among Google search returns on popular topics, you’ll often see old posts continuing to be among the most-read for months after writing.
So here are some data for you as well as a nice list of posts that you may have missed first time around:
