Bluematter.

Flying out to India in a few hours for a friend's wedding, so little or no blogging over here in the next 10 days. See you all then.

Justin and Jacqueline - sorry, haven't had a chance to reply to you yet, but will be doing so when I'm back.

Look out, he should be making his appearance soon.

And no, datacharmer is not authoring the Friday Special.

This blog has had visitors from every single State in the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) - except from Wyoming!

Would you like to give me a helping hand here? If you know someone living in Wyoming, email them with a link to this blog or a specific post. If you are a blogger that can spare a couple of lines, post a link to this blog simply saying 'If you are from Wyoming, click here'.

This is a little experiment. I am curious to see how long it will take for the first visitor from Wyoming to arrive following this plea, and then observe the dynamics and report back to you. How far can Wyoming climb in the States' visitors rankings?

Your help is greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Mission accomplished! Thanks Tim, thanks to all who sent out those emails and thanks to the Wyomingites who dropped by.

Bluematter readers loyal and occasional, thank you ever so much. You deserve all this and more. (Make sure the sound's on!)

I am out of town for a week with limited access to the internet, and a fine economist and good friend has agreed to guestblog here at Bluematter. while I am away. Most of you are not my mom, but I thought I'd let you know anyways.

If you encountered any problems accessing bluematter at your workplace today, it probably had something to do with Saturday's post: 'F***: The economics of coarse language'. Taking this paper as my starting point, I was discussing how coarse language serves a very useful signalling purpose and how, contrary to the author's assertion, word taboo-isation can be perfectly rational.

I have now taken the offending post offline, but if you are interested email me and I will be happy to forward it to you. Also, I would be grateful if anyone who encountered problems and can now access the blog could drop me a line and let me know (I am not sure whether I've been blacklisted temporarily or whether this will have a more lasting effect).

While on the subject of censorship, I also have a nagging suspicion that bluematter is no longer accessible from China: I used to get hits on a daily basis, but in the past 20 days there hasn't been a single visitor from the land of the Great Firewall.

Can't swear, can't talk politics: where's the fun in that?