Welcome to all my new Ukrainian Readers!

 GBIBCIJ (the acronym for my blog, I really regret not having gone with a simpler title) is proud to welcome all its new readers from Ukraine!

It seems in the past month interest in Japanese baseball cards in that lovely east European country has exploded.  Just look at the above Stats overview from the last week - I'm getting more Ukrainians than from every other country in the world combined!   I'm sure this is only affecting my blog and no others, am I right?  They just love Japanese baseball cards as much as they like playing the kobza!

Or at least I think they do, that's just one of the first images you get from Googling "Ukrainian culture".  So I'll go with that.

Anyway: Welcome!  Or as they say in Ukrainian:

Ласкаво просимо!

 Here is another interesting thing about Ukrainian Japanese baseball collectors, they seem to be particularly fascinated with a single post of mine that is more than 5 years old which accounts for about 90% of their page views.  Its about how when I was collecting the 2014 Calbee set I ended up with a lot of extra chip bags in my kitchen!

According to Google, this is what a Ukrainian kitchen looks like:

See?  No bags of Calbee potato chips anywhere to be found.  Hence their interest in that particular post, it must seem unusual to have kitchens full of bags of Calbee baseball chips if you are from a country that has none!

Also they all seem to have stumbled onto my blog through the same URL, something called "onlinenow".  Totally legit if you ask me.  Definitely nothing untowards going on there and I'm 100% sure that if I click on that back link I will have zero regrets about doing so. No regrets at all, no sireee.  I just haven't had the time to do so, but I'm sure I'll be pleasantly surprised if I ever do.

Happy as I am to welcome all my new Ukrainian readers, it is with a sad heart that I have to announce that interest in Japanese baseball cards from Russian readers seems to have dropped off a cliff almost the exact moment Ukrainian readers became so engaged.  This may have been caused by my controversial post "Bad Stuff about my Russian Readers" which I admit may have gone too far in places and could have caused offence.  I'm sorry, Russian readers, please come back!

Anyway, I'm hoping that I'll be able to parlay my newfound "Big in Ukraine" status into some lucrative endorsement deals there, I promise to keep you updated on how that goes.