14 Years of MM-Musings

I started MM-Musings (Munson Missions Musings) as a way to put my own thoughts onto electronic paper. Here are a few thoughts or random facts over the last 14 years.

#1. My first post was a short story called “Hiding in the Light.” It might be described as an old joke with a point. I still like it. Hiding in the Light.

#2. It is clear that writing on Christian missions is not the best way to get views. Evidence of this? First, my most popular post of all time is “Oral Transmission and ‘Rida Rida Ranka’” which is a post about how an old Swedish nursery rhyme morphed over generations because it was almost always passed on parent to child orally rather than through writing. The most popular post in the last 12 months is “Mythology and Theodicy in the Visayas.” In both cases, even though I did reflect on the topic missiologically, almost certainly the searches were driven by secular interests (Swedish nursery rhyme and Visayan creation myth respectively.) That is okay. I decided years ago that I would write what on the topics that interested me, NOT what would interest others.

#3. I have never had a viral post— pretty much a unicorn on traditional ‘blogs’ anyway. However, prior to this year, the closest I came to ‘virality’ I was on February 25, 2014. I had 3,900 hits in a 24 hour period. That is pretty big when I rarely averaged more than 1 hit an hour. I was not happy about it. In 2013 there was a self-styled Christian “prophet” who said that all sorts of horrible things would happen in the Philippines because Filipinos were not… Oh… I can’t remember what exactly, but it was pretty suspect. However, in his many predictions, he got one quite right. He spoke of a typhoon cutting through the Visayas and doing great destruction… and it happened! He also spoke of an earthquake happening somewhere at some time and one happened close to the time of the typhoon on the island of Bohol. The earthquake was not all that impressive… but it got some people excited who get excited about these sorts of things. They started to look at other predictions of his. One was a prediction of a plague in Cebu that would make people’s skins black. That sounded a bit racist, or am I wrong? Another one grabbed more traction— the spread of a flesh eating bacteria beginning in Pangasinan. I decided to calculate how accurate this “prophet” was. I decided to be VERY GENEROUS because most of his predictions had no due date or even location. Since the Philippines is like the epicenter of natural disasters… most of the predictions are likely to come true…………. eventually. But even with a lot of generosity, I still only calculated his accuracy at 35%. A less kind person would have come up with a much lower number. Then one day, my hits went wild and especially on that posts about this “prophet.” I wondered what happened until I checked out the news. ABS-CBN, one of the major networks in the Philippines had put out a report about a flesh-eating bacteria in Pangasinan and how it was seen as predicted by this “prophet.” Some of you probably already guessed this, but the report was false— perhaps stirred up by “prophet groupies” who wanted him to look good so much that they would put out false reports. That really griped me. I hated how my website got a statistic bump for something that actually offended me. I don’t feel as bad about it now… so I will grudginingly give the links here:

Prophecies and Typhoons and Plagues (in no particular order), Part 1

Prophecies and Typhoons and Plagues (in no particular order), Part 2

“Misteryosong Sakit sa Pangasinan”?

#4. It is strange, but my statistics have shot up greatly this year. It is likely that my views this year will be more than twice that of 2023. And 2023 was twice the number of views of 2019. It does seem like COVID did drive people deeper into the niche corners of the NOT-DARK Web. My posts have not been more clever or alluring than in the past. In fact, only one post I wrote this year has been in the top 25 for views this year. But that is okay. Glad people are looking at the old stuff.

#5. I have thought of listing the posts that I am proudest of. But I have found that quite difficult. In the end, I rather list the most popular ones that I am at least rather proud of.

These are listed in my TOP POSTS. So you can just go there and check them out.