FCB # 166 and the FCB Blog

 

Dear Folkies,

March was a wonderful month and thank you all for attending FCB # 166 so well, despite the the local public transport strike last Friday. You were certainly very well rewarded with a sparkling programme of live acoustic music at an extraordinary high level. Not only did we have Ismael and Thomas as featured artists with some amazing instrumental guitar music, but also Midnight Fyre, who have been featured artists at past folk clubs, Ashleigh and Gareth came along en route from Prague back to the UK and honoured us with a floor spot extraordinaire. Although Wolfgang Schreifer couldn’t attend because of a broken toe, the poetry corner did us proud, with not one, but two of the poems in the top five most popular poems in the UK, „If“ by Rudyard Kipling and „ I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud“ by William Wordworth.

There will be written reports available for you to peruse regarding the music later.

Anyway, some of you have been looking at the blog recently, quite a lot of you in fact it seems. Early in January we went past half a million and as the blog is actually sixteen years old this month. Almost as old as Folk Club Bonn. I would like to link you to Chuck Berrry’s hit song  „Sweet Little Sixteen“ as a token of celebration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksbSil1Nn3g&list=RDksbSil1Nn3g&start_radio=1

The keen sighted ones amongst you might recognise an old Stoner playing rhythm guitar behind Chuck in the form of Keith Richards. This was recorded in 1987 in St Louis, so even Keith looks a lot younger than he actually does today. So while January did not bring us „half a million framed autographs“ as mentioned in the song, it did bring us over 500,000.00 clicks in January on the FCB Blog. So thank you all for your continued support.

The man who conceived the FCB Blog, Barry L. Roshto would not have been very inpressed with the half a million in January, but I’m sure he was chuffed with the 512,000.00 mark which we achieved already in February. Barry being a keen mathematician as well as a musician has been following the FCB Blog‘s progress by means of a geometric progression: 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512, 1024. So this year gave us two highlights within a very short space of time of each other!

So many thanks to Barry for developing this wonderful little Blog and keeping it going when we lesser technically minded mortals occaisionally mess it up. Thanks Barry! Apart from his musical and mathematical talents Barry is also a great media artist and you can check out some of his exploits here together with Ursel Quint : https://snowkrash.org/   Do check it out and please do remind Barry that his first after the break spot is still available for him on First Fridays of the month at Folk Club Bonn.

At the beginning, in 2010,  the FCB Blog was only managing an average of 25,000 clicks per annum and as it has taken 16 years to reach half a million this averages out at 31,250 clicks per annum. We are now at 533,111.00 today, so if this rate continues we should reach the million mark before the current decade has ended! We certainly did not see that coming.