Brother #2 as a used the expression ‘X of a thousand Ys”. Example: the backyard was buggy, it was land of a thousand flies”. The other day I was poking around the stats on WordPress when I noticed I have a thousand followers. This sounds impressive, but then I had a look-see who these suckers are. What a collection! It certainly doesn’t lack for variety. At first glance it swells my pride, but then I looked closer. On the whole I smell a rat – several in fact. Let’s look at the categories of these so-called followers:

[1] Companies. These are along the line of “Puppy dogs Training” and “The daily Binge” and “Neotype Station.com” . There are a lot of vitamin stores as well. These sound like legitimate places, but not people. I wonder if they are there to ‘bait me’ to come visit their shop. “Artic Heat Pumps” has been following me since 2015, the dear.

[2] Folks from India (or that part of the world). Mostly men but some women too, they have names like Akash Triverdi, Shukufa Sayadli, and Pathan al Fesh. They seem to be real people but if they are following me (some have done so for years) none have left comment.

There is one named ‘Indianluxuryfurniture’ that seems to a combination of [1] and [2].

[3] Sultry babes. Patience above! There are a lot of young women following me, more so than the Indian-sounding men-folk. They have large eyes and lips, and their photos are often ‘from the chest up” (the men tend to be photographed ‘from the neck up’), so I can see their bosoms. They don’t seem to use proper names but code-types, like ‘Somekindof20″ and “JJJanae”. If they are legitimate followers (and not call-girls) they also don’t leave word.

[4] WTF-types. These are faceless/no photo types with letters/numbers for names. ‘maxlcreapu’ and ‘spankycocktail’ and ‘petbesty’. “Jinsuxhoi” is my longest follower, the dear!

and then there is

[5] Real people; no rubbish-types. Folks with proper-sounding names with photos (not displaying cleavage) and with seemingly real email addresses. Many of them I recognize as fellow bloggers or blogger buddies, but not all of them. Maybe not the majority.

I’ve been too timorous to click any of them and see if they lead me to a real blog or not. I sense I will get only ads or arrive at nasty sights and come back covered in cookies and malware.

So, what to make of these thousand acolytes? Part of me thinks to leave them alone. If they want an announcement every time I post they are welcome. The Swiss-German in me want to delete the ones that seem suspicious, which is nearly all of them – but what if I get rid of someone genuine? Is there any harm to keep them or is it better to flush-em, lest they have sinister cookie-connections.

Can anyone shed some light on these matters? I am keen to learn. For all I know I maybe living in a fool’s paradise.

P.S. I went ahead and deleted “tastyclickblog”. I am down to 999.