Metablogging

Lifted from comments (well, to be precise, from comment)

This is nothing to do with your post, but I can think of no other way to ask you a couple of questions, merely out of curiosity:
Why, after five years of regular posting in an interesting and literate blog, have you had so few comments?
Why do you give away so little about yourself?

Well, taking them singly,

1) Why have I had so few comments (and, I imagine, so few readers)?

False modesty (or modesty of any kind) aside, the most direct reasons would seem to be that
a) I don't advertise or cross-list much, so to find me at all you would have to be searching for something I've covered
b) I'm not in fact all that regular a poster; to be a power in the land you have to blog daily, or at least twice a week, or people get irritated at all the wasted clicking and stay away.
These are probably less important than the personality factors, such as
c) I don't particularly mind whether I'm read or not: in actual face-to-face conversation I'm a competitive monologist who feels that unexpressed opinions cause kidney damage, and this attitude translates beautifully to blogging.

2) Why do I give away so little about myself?

Even by the standards of this blog, I'm not particularly interesting. I'm literate because I've spent most of my time here reading, which is not in itself interesting; I have posted on a door at home the quote from Logan Pearsall Smith "Some people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

The most interesting thing in my life last week wasn't anything internal, it was experimenting with making my own lard.