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July 9, 2003

A Blogger’s Dream (Shattered)

Filed under: pre-06-2006 — David Giacalone @ 10:24 pm

Weakday Special. It was unprecedentedly wonderful: My humble little blawg had thousands of hits before noon yesterday. Yes, a blogger’s dream come true, and things got really exciting as the evening came and the hits counter (on the Harvard Weblog Rankings page) neared and passed into the 5-digit range, and finally peaked at nearly 11,000 before midnight. In just one day, during my 6th week as a blawgger, I had doubled my all-time hits. And my hurried, on-vacation posting yesterday morning (about efforts to aid pro se litigants) wasn’t even particularly inspiring.

It had already been a special day — on vacation in a sleepy Village, visiting an adoring niece and nephew and spending a rare afternoon with my twin brother. Honestly, though, I started to suspect something might be amiss at about 4 PM, when we returned from viewing The Phillips Collection exhibit at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery (a nostalgic treat, reminding me of 20 years of visits to the Phillips over two decades of residence in Washington, D.C.). You see, I noticed that Derek Slater’s copyright/internet blawg A Copyfighter’s Musings was also spectacularly popular, with over 40,000 hits by the end of the afternoon (57,000 by the end of the day). Just maybe, these weren’t actual page hits, I surmised, with my usual intuitive prowess.

Unable to solve the riddle, I posted a question about it with the Harvard-Weblog-Support Group at Yahoo!. So far, I’ve only had one response, but it sounds quite probable. Blogger Bob Bennett, editor of the popular Robert John Bennett Blog (which features installments of his draft novel The End is Where We Start From) wrote from Munich and suggested:

“Maybe some weird attempt to hack into a computer associated with the Law School? If so, web pages concerned with topics like ethics or fighting computer piracy might be likely targets.”

I’ll probably never know the answer. I do know that my contentment over averaging 300+ hits a day has been sadly undermined. The dream has perhaps turned into a recurring nightmare of raised-but-unmet expectations. And my totals and averages will be suspect from now on. (Sigh).

Supreme Serendipity. Driving back home from Western New York this afternoon, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten a very important meaning for the word “honorably” when I made my posting on Sunday about the Arizona Supreme Court decision to replace the word “zealously” with “honorably” in the Rules of Professional Conduct. Just by chance, I was listening to the audiobook by Bill Bonanno entitled Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story. (1999, Simon & Schuster Audio Div.) In the book, Mr. Bonanno (son of the legendary godfather Joe “Bananas” Bonanno) stresses his own connections and life in Arizona, and Mob influence in the State, while describing what it means to be a “man of honor.” With my own Sicilian ancestry, I shouldn’t have overlooked this special meaning of honor — giving due respect to people of authority and power, while brooking no disrespect to yourself (and seeking revenge when necessary). We definitely need to consider this special definition, when assessing the possible ramifications of Arizona’s one-word amendment to the Rules of Conduct. Thank goodness, I pulled that cassette case off the Library shelf before taking my two-day vacation. Serendipity Rules!

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