maintenance

Gisela has reminded me that if I don't post regularly the audience will dry up.  I thought every four or five days would be plenty regular (and frankly more than anyone could stand), but the collective attention span of the internet is mighty brief I guess.  What with all the choice options competing for your eyeballs - like this, or this.  I am not going to even try and compete with this.

Gisela knows these things because a) she's a professional b) she's younger than me and c) she's internet wizard enough to have installed Google Analytics on my blog (in my blog? under my blog? As if portuguese weren't hard enough...).  This means that I can get exacting demographic details about you people.  Or rather Gisela can tell me the exacting details - I still have no idea how to access it.

It's pretty alarming actually, and puts paid to the idea that the internet is "anonymous".  I can pretty well tell who's reading and who isn't (and what you've just been reading - that should make you nervous...).  Some interesting details: of the hundred-some-odd visitors, 13 are in the US.  Which means my amusing observations are just like soccer, or futebol - a phenomenon everywhere but the States.  That's like 2% readership on my home turf.  Or basically just my parents.  Gisela also pointed out that the average length of the visit for US clickers is 3 minutes, versus 1 minute for the rest of the world.  So at least they're actually reading, my parents.  I think everyone else gets as far as the fancy picture at the top.  All of which is not so encouraging, but I will soldier on in the face of all this virtual yawning.

The extent of my own savvy for assessing internet metrics is to just type "everyone should have a brazilian wife" into google and see if it even shows up.  It doesn't.  But the top result that Google returns is for mail order brides from Brazil.  So now anyone can have a brazilian wife.

Which leads me to say something about the title... I quickly came up with it under intense pressure from my wife who was creating the blog in a real hurry.  So not a lot of thought went into it is my point. But it's been interesting to gauge the reactions, roughly organizing into four groups. Obviously it's big hit in Brazil, for the average Brasileiro who is, or will be, married to a Brasileira.  They concur.

I have also learned that this blog (or basically just the title) is being used (entirely without my authorization I want to stress) as an instrument of none-too-subtle pressure against other gringos who are currently dating, but not yet married to, Brazilians abroad.  My brother can hopefully help out with the technical terminology for verb tenses, but I believe in this specific instance it's being read as (or, more accurately, read by brazilians to their gringo boyfriends) the imperative.  As in: "You should have a Brazilian wife.  Agora."

Then I've met a few Brazilians who are married, but to a gringa.  I can tell they're amused, but also a little annoyed by my precocity.  I also imagine that, as married life can occasionally be especially in a multinational couple, they have probably thought to themselves at some point "Nossa, I should have married a Brazilian wife."  That's like the V8 tense...

And then the other 13 readers... the Americanos.  I suspect the title sounds a bit boastful.  And, é verdade, I am very proud of minha mulher.  But, as in the similar case above, there are also those times, very few and far between to be sure, where I mean to say "You should try having a brazilian wife"...

But, of course, most of the time it's all água de coco and samba...