Simon Cowell "Joins the Ordinariate"

Sometimes strange things seem to be happening and we need to find an explanation.
Or at least I do.

So this is in many respects a meta-blog-post rather than a blog post.

It is based on the observation that many people are coming to the Beaker Folk blog from all sorts of places that are not explicitly linking to it. And it took a while to understand why. But after going through Google Analytics and then following the links back to the originating URLs, I've now sussed it.

The explanation goes like this. In the side-bar of the Beaker Blog you will observe that we have a blog-roll. This is an ongoing feast of constant entertainment, covering religions and denominations of many kinds and none, astronomy and doilies.

Blogger observes this blogroll, and regards it as forming "links" to all sorts of other blog posts belonging to other people.

Blogger also has a "Links to this post" function at the bottom of each blogpost, that people can activate if they so desire. But because the blogging community is not so constantly cross-referring as we might all hope, that's a bit sparse on its own. And so Blogger is filling in links to these posts from the blog-roll of this blog. Thus generating more cross-references but giving everyone an inflated view of how inter-connected we really all are.

I hope that's clear. And now I'm off to join Burton for an afternoon's train-spotting at Ridgmont station. It promises to be a cold, lonely and depressing afternoon.