Millennium

The post now before you is the one thousandth entry in the "Friar's Fires" blog, which began in January 2008 as a spin-off from my sermon postings. It exists mostly because although I now serve churches, I remain at heart someone who very much wishes he was Mike Royko and who, thanks to the wonders of the internet, can pretend to be exactly that.

Over the course of these three and a half years, by far my most visited post is this one from September 2008, not because anyone was clamoring for my particular viewpoint about a silly young Italian woman auctioning off her virginity but because I used the "now we're just haggling over the price" joke as my set-up. Apparently a lot of people want to know where that quote came from, and Google conveniently sends some of them my way when they look it up via Google search. Thanks, Larry and Sergey -- couldn't have done it without you.

My favorite post is a tougher question. I have a soft spot in my heart for this one, in which I adapt the theme song of the Lee Majors TV show The Fall Guy into Shakespearish language based on the proximity of their birthdays. I like most of them about the same, though, so I guess we'll leave it at that.

My traffic level is not high -- according to the statistics kept by Blogger, which go back to May 2009 I'm a touch above 8,000 total page views. My comment level is even lower. But I don't know if people who blog for others have as much fun as people who blog for themselves anyway. Is there an audience for random reviews of airport novels, assorted Netflix offerings, occasional science news focusing on astronomy, geek-speak blurbs on comic books, mockery of collegiate stupidity, baseball, the amazing shallowness of a good deal of modern pop culture and so on? Well, yes, but I'm pretty sure that the set of the audience for the above list is an identity with the set of the writer of said blog, meaning I may be the only one who's interested in the things I blog about.

Anyway, I was pretty sure that I would eventually reach a thousand posts -- I know some people take a hiatus from blogging or sometimes just give it up entirely. But since without my own unique personal point of view the internet would just be a vast sea of sanity, rationality and even-handed reasoned opinions, I'm going to keep plugging along.