40,000

My site meter just told me I surpassed 40,000 visits since shortly after this blog was begun. But look at the weird spike in my graph! (This image was taken just at the end of March, when it was most symmetrical.) The reason for the sudden jump is a passing hyperlinked reference (actually a dead link) to what is perhaps the most famous image by a certain flaxen-haired NY artist who famously speculated about everyone someday having 15 minutes of fame. (Fame, fame, fame... if he goes unnamed here, I think you'll see why.) Because of the link, my blog became the first on a list of Google Images for said image. Almost immediately, I started getting storms of hits from all over the world, although mostly from Britain. After I threw in a couple of soup can images to satisfy the hunger, the tide became a tsunami. In July and August I didn't post at all, yet recorded record numbers of hits. In September, I was getting as many as 400 Google visits a day for that single purpose. I figure I got as many as 12,000 in about three months and a half. Then, some time in October, visits plummeted back to normal. The reason: Google had bumped me down the list for said image, and whew -- what a relief! once again I could actually see on my site meter traces of fellow bloggers and researchers accessing this blog for its express purpose.

So these seemingly high numbers are, well, artificially inflated. Grossly inflated. As are most such numbers on the net.