It's a Small World

I've just been checking my blog stats and among other things it shows where my blog visitors come from. I was surprised to see that I have visitors from both Russia and Egypt. Either this is wonderful and it means my readership is spreading throughout the world, OR it means someone in Russia is looking for a way to hack/spam/take over my blog and someone in Egypt is similarly looking for a way to infiltrate my blog with terror messages.

Let's hope the former! I'm amazed at how small the world has become. When I ran a contest on a website last year the prize for the entries that had traveled the most miles went to South Africa, followed by Finland. I certainly have friends from all over the world on Facebook. Every now and then I'm reading through Facebook news and a chat button will click on and I find myself chatting with someone from Africa or Australia. How cool is this? Perhaps Facebook will actually achieve what everyone else has tried to do--bring about world peace and understanding!
Today I go literary... I'm reading at Litquake, which is a week long festival of the written word in San Francisco. I'm reading at a theater with fellow crime writers Barry Eisler, Sophie Littlefield and one more, but we follow a group of poets and after us a group of memoirs. I'm going first, thanks to beginning with B,so I'm just hoping that the poet before me hasn't written a long poem about the death of a butterfly or the end of the world, because I intend to make people laugh with an excerpt from Royal Blood.