{"id":1009,"date":"2017-05-10T10:07:22","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T10:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherscholar.com\/cherblog\/nerdy-cher-stuff-poetry-statistics\/"},"modified":"2023-02-20T08:18:15","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T15:18:15","slug":"nerdy-cher-stuff-poetry-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherscholar.com\/cherblog\/2017\/05\/nerdy-cher-stuff-poetry-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Nerdy Cher Stuff: Poetry & Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Javier-collection\"<\/a>Poetry<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s very exciting for me when my poetry and Cher blogs overlap. That\u2019s the kind of nerd I am. And they have been overlapping lately.<\/p>\n

I finished another year of the NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) challenge, which involves writing a poem a day for the month of April. No easy feat, especially when you commit to following the prompts, which I did this year.<\/p>\n

The prompt of April 26 was to write a poem about how an archaeologist in the future would make sense of our culture. In my poem, archaeologists uncover my garage full of Cher memorabilia. To the left is a picture of Cher scholar Javier Ozuna's very fine Cher collection<\/a>. Mine is not nearly this extensive but imagine archeologists coming upon this scene and trying to write up a thesis on it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s rare that I do a Cher poem. I don't know why. I think I\u2019ve only done two really crappy ones and those were over 20 years ago. I called this poem \u201cThe Relics of Very Tiny Religions<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

I'm back to enjoying the Cher\/Sonny & Cher shows on GetTV. There have also been quite a few skits that are new to me. Either previous TVLand of VH1 episodes skipped them or on was a fully new episodes for me.  This segment floored me. It's a bad recording from a bad recording but it\u2019s Cher reciting the poem \u201cIf\u201d by Rudyard Kipling<\/a>.  Cher references the cartoonist Sergio Aragon\u00e9s<\/a>, who you might recognize from 1970s MAD magazines and books. Cher, like everybody else, can\u2019t help but recite in \u201cthe poem voice,\u201d a kind of plodding tone everybody uses when reading poems for some reason. There are some prophetic moments of the cartoon and poem, including…<\/p>\n

\"Narcissm\"<\/a> \"If\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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…the bits about narcissism and political corruption.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more Cher\/poetry commentary to come because I\u2019m really into protest poetry right now<\/a>  and reading the mother anthology of protest poetry, \u201cAgainst Forgetting, 20th<\/sup> Century Poetry of Witness,\u201d the first section of which is poets of the Armenian genocide.<\/p>\n

\"Readersguide\"<\/a>Statistics<\/h4>\n

At work I often do usage research on Google Analytics and keyword research on Google Trends. When I start to learn any new research tool, I always test it out by plugging 'Cher' into the system to see how it works. I've done this my whole life, since learning how to use the green periodical lookup books at the school library when I was a tween.They were very boring books but led to all the articles of Cher in People Magazine <\/em>and Ladies Home Journal<\/em> that I could check out in the library which was a great incentive to plunging into the nerd universe.<\/p>\n

Anyway, plugging Cher into Google Trends led me to discover two great new-to-me Cher sites:<\/p>\n