As you may have noticed I have made a few changes to the site over the last couple of days. There are two primary reasons for the changes: To reduce bandwidth consumption and to make it easier for the search engines to point users to the content they’re looking for. Most of my traffic comes from image searches and I’ve noticed over the last few months that a couple of the major image search engines are casting ever wider nets. Instead of linking searchers to the specific post that has the image or images the user is looking for they increasingly link them to the month in which the post in question rests. The result is that users have a harder time to find what they are looking for while bandwidth consumption is unnecessarily boosted. I’m currently pushing out 12 GB a month, which isn’t a whole lot in the scheme of things and certainly less than I could do, but at the same time more than than would be required if search engines were a bit more precise.

So what exactly have I done? I have collapsed archive links from monthly to annual on all single-post pages, while the monthly links are displayed on all archive pages. Archive pages now show excerpts instead of whole posts, which hopefully will help engines fine tune their linking to content on this site. The home page will continue to show the entire content for the ten most recent posts. I have also removed the blog roll from single-post pages, which wasn’t an easy decision. I have tried to mitigate it by creating a separate blogroll page to which all single-page posts link. All archive pages and the home page still include the blogroll in its entirety.

Finally, I’ve added a page that lists some current economic and demographic data for the United States (as well as a teaser for the page in the homepage sidebar). It’s actually a concept I’m ripping from a Swedish-language site I’ve been working on every now and then since 1999, Amerika.Nu, and I’ve been planning on adding it to this site for some time. Now it’s finally here, and I’ll expand it over the next few weeks.

Here’s the logo for some artsy event in Sweden:

It must be sending subliminal messages because I feel like having a large cup of coffee. Delish!

Boston Red Sox fans are an obnoxious bunch. Their team having the second highest payroll in Major League Baseball isn’t enough of an advantage for them, they want guaranteed championships.

Red Sox Nation? More like Red Sox Welfare State.

2007 was a pretty good year. Not as good perhaps as the magical 1999 when money, fun and excitement were everywhere, but still pretty good. It was certainly better than all the years between 1999 and 2007.

Best of all was the turnaround in Iraq and the resulting drop in U.S. casualties thanks to the increase in troop levels and shifting alliances and priorities among several Iraqi factions.

Second best was the defeat and redefeat of the amnesty for illegal aliens that Senator John McCain and President George W. Bush pushed for very hard. The pro-amnesty forces fittingly threw in the towel just couple of days before Independence Day. It was a remarkable victory for the common citizen and a stunning defeat for corporations, ethnic grievance activists and other members of the pro-amnesty forces. Not that the struggle is over: The pro-amnesty gang will try to piecemeal advance amnesty and dismantle border security and immigration law enforcement. It won’t be easy to beat them back over and over.

There was much to rejoice over in Boston sports. The Boston Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies in the World Series after a tough American League Championship Series against Cleveland Indians. The Boston Celtics unexpectedly vaulted to the top of the National Basketball Association in spite losing out in the NBA draft lottery. The Boston College Eagles finished their season 11-3 and won their eighth straight bowl game. Matt Ryan was widely seen as one of the top collegiate quarterbacks in the country.

Most importantly, my beloved New England Patriots reloaded after a heart breaking loss to Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship game. They added wide receivers Randy Moss, Wes Welker, and Donte Stallworth, tight end Kyle Brady, and linebacker Adalius Thomas through trades and free agency acquisitions. The new and improved Patriots rolled through the regular season undefeated, the first team ever to go 16-0 in the regular season. Tom Brady set a league record for touchdown passes (50), Moss for touchdown receptions (23), and Welker a team record for receptions (112). The team is in great position to roll through the play offs and win the Super Bowl for the fourth time in seven years.

Otherwise it wasn’t a particularly cheerful year for Massachusetts. In fact, it was another forgettable year for a state that is economically stuck in neutral, and demographically and fiscally in reverse and that is slowly losing its soul and identity. Previously dry towns started issuing liquor licenses like there’s no tomorrow and Governor Deval Patrick found a most bumbling and disingenuous way to promote the establishment of in-state casinos.

It’s too early to evaluate the usefulness of Massachusetts’ ambitious experiment with mandatory and partially subsidized health insurance, but the dramatic cost overruns aren’t promising.

The new free daily newspaper BostonNow turned out to be singularly awful. If Metro was the free newspaper for the era of 50 cable channels Now is the paper for the MySpace era. The terrifically entertaining radio talker Howie Carr went off air for several weeks while butting heads with station management before returning to WRKO, albeit for more money. The substantially less terrific Eileen McNamara left her columnist gig at The Boston Globe and was replaced with reporter Yvonne Abraham, who quickly took the year off on maternity leave.

The disastrous Boston police chief Kathleen O’Toole was finally sacked by Mayor Tom Menino and was succeeded by Ed Davis. Well, what do you know? Murder and other crime rates started falling.

The most overlooked story of the year: Boston turned majority white again, in part, I think, because many non-whites used subprime mortgages to buy houses in relatively cheap towns like Randolph.

The most overdone story: LED signs.

That’s all big world stuff. In the little world that is me, myself and I a few notable things happened.

- I chased a mugger through the streets of Kenmore Square, although to little effect. You’re probably thinking de’ va’ mig ett jävla tjat, but that’s the thing, things like that don’t happen often. That’s what makes them notable.

- In an off-hand remark my doctor told me to exercise more so I started working out harder than I ever have since I stopped playing football. It was fun - and hopefully healthy - but I got sidetracked a bit when

- I and the missus vacationed in Washington state for ten days. Great trip. Great place. It was also an opportunity to watch the Red Sox live since tickets are much more plentiful at Safeco Field in Seattle than at Fenway Park at our end of I-90.

- And then we moved to the suburbs after nearly ten years in the city (15 for my wife, a graduate of Boston University). It would be fun to point to some particularly dramatic incident that brought about the move but it was more or less just time. We simply grew old as the square grew young again. I shall, perhaps, at some point, compose a retrospective post on my years in Kenmore Square. Shortly after we decided to move we saw this at Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street in Back Bay, where we got married almost a decade ago:

Timely and topical, one could say.

My five most read (sort of) posts this year, in order:

NFL bans cheerleaders from distracting players from opposing teams (I may have been the first on the web who reported this very important edict, which helped bring in the masses after a Sunday pre-game show mentioned the league memo).

Nothing but pictures of New England Patriots Cheerleaders.

A Sunday morning at New England Patriots 2007 training camp (pictures of Moss, Welker, Brady and the offensive line are a powerful lure in this season of perfection).

Ebay Live 2007 Day 2: Google talk, booth babes and other fun (a little something for everyone!).

Nothing but pictures of Boston Celtics Dancers (this could be my favorite post of the year. Notice the absence of purple prose. I’m a disciplined writer).

According to sources of probably ill repute a woman has to speak 6,000 words a day and she basically won’t stop talking until she’s filled that quota.

In other words, ladies, when your married friends call, PICK UP THE PHONE!

I’ve added some updates and additional observations and links to my New England Patriots at Dallas Cowboys post. I’m terribly unhappy with how that post came out. My next post will have better structure and hopefully be less rambling. I’m thinking about doing a short podcast for readers who have minutes of commuting to kill. I know you’ve also wanted to hear a Swedish Chef sound-alike talk football. Hoom-hop-dee-doo blitz blitz blitz. I have written a follow-up piece to the one about Assyrians and the Armenian genocide called “Kurds, Poles and Polygamists” but I’m not sure whether to publish it. It’s kind of interesting, I suppose, but the topic can be better handled by more capable people. We’ll see. I have some pictures and wine-tasting reviews from Connecticut in the works, as well. Roger Goodell, the National Football League’s sanctimonious thug with a badge, is talking about playing Super Bowl games overseas. I commented on that moronic idea a few months ago. The second paragraph is really all you need to read.

Finally, something read-worthy on another blog:

Is Fenway Park good for Fenway? My talking-point reaction: What’s the best way for the area to take advantage of the Park’s presence? (Via Universal Hub)

Bonus! Here’s a good joke for people looking for nasty right-wing attacks on Al Gore’s latest prize:

Norway has two things going for it: Oil and awarding Nobel’s Peace Prize. The former is a gift from God and the latter a gift from a Swede.

New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick grew up at the U.S. Naval Academy, where his father was an assistant coach and scout for decades. Now, if Belichick were to run some kind of spy program, which he should and hopefully does, don’t you think he’d be more likely to model it after GRU, KGB, Mossad, Stasi or some other top notch intelligence service rather than President Richard Nixon’s Mickey Mouse operation? Yet one constantly runs into comparisons between Spygate and Watergate, and Belichick has frequently been described as some semi-deranged, paranoid, and, as they say, Nixonian character.

A proper comparison would be “Macaca,” the devastatingly effective video that a Democratic operative shot of a Republican candidate in Virginia last year, with the only difference that the NFL prohibits doing the kind of video taping Belichick did, presumably to offer the League’s dimmer bulbs - Edwards, Turner, Childress -some protection from the added pressure of having to code signals. But I guess if one has one’s head up one’s Beltway then everything is Watergate and “Nixonian.”

I’ll be back early next week, I hope, with a couple of voluminous posts on the New England Patriots and especially the team’s offensive line. I’ve been busy with being busy the past few days and I will probably remain in that state for another few days. But all good things to those who wait, including some pretty decent pictures from Patriots’ game against Titans last Friday.

Jen Stewart is looking for one to visit in October and welcomes recommendations.

I can’t help her myself because I’ve barely even been to Maine, but perhaps you can?

IKEA hacking is what geeks call it when they repurpose furniture from IKEA, for example by turning the shelf Gorm into floor planks. Ingenious stuff.

One should not, however, hack the foodstuff one can purchase in IKEA stores. In particular, one should not mix Löfbergs Lila coffee with Starbucks coffee, because the resulting beverage is absolutely awful.