Today, or tomorrow at the latest, the blague Dr. Metablog will have been visited for the twenty-thousandth time. A milestone -- twenty thousand readers.
Well, perhaps not exactly readers. It would be more accurate to say twenty-thousand page viewers. Twenty-thousand page views is considerably fewer than twenty-thousand readers. Actually, many of those page-viewers aren't readers at all and only viewers by accident; they don't stop long enough to read or to view; page glancers, perhaps. They just touch down to find out whether whatever they've googled is what they want and then, disappointed, off they go in a microsecond. For example, Dr. M. once wrote an entry in which he made fun of the overuse, in book titles, of the word "naked." Consequently, the blague Dr. Metablog googles to the surface when someone types in "naked weightlifting" or "naked skiiing" -- a search that is attempted oodles more often than in his innocence Dr. Metablog might ever have imagined. Internet pilgrims hoping to find salacious portraits of naked hairy weightlifters are mighty crushed and are off like a shot -- but they still leave their electronic trace. Another example: Dr. M once wrote a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov's excellent novel, Lolita. Did Dr M. know that the word "lolita" is a term of art in the world of sexual exploitation? Pity the internet hairypalms and chicken-chokers, who, searching for secret pleasure, encounter (gasp) literary criticism.
We here at Dr. M. could increase "traffic" simply by using such code words or by listing body parts of a groinal or perigroinal nature, but we're too proud to do so just to increase readership --or viewership -- or glancemanship.
Nevertheless, all of us here at Dr. Metablog are overjoyed to reach the twenty-thousand mark, whatever that number signifies. So best regards to our readers from regular staff members Vivian de St. Vrain, Otto Onions, and Amber Feldhammer, as well as occasional contributors Alan Saxe-Poppette, Michael Hollingsworth, Professor Marion Morrison Ph. D., Spike Schapiro, and Otis Jefferson Brown.
Onward to thirty thousand!
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