The Quarter-Millionaire

So, I don't know how much you look around when you visit here, but over there on the right-hand column there's a lot going on.

Over there - beneath the list of favorite fellow bloggers (Hi, Peter! Hi, Cookie! Hi, Jon! And, maybe most of all, greetings and thanks, Thombeau!), below the Twitter feed (and are you following @CafeMuscato?  You really ought to...), and down below the rather daunting index of all the nonsense I've thought to catalogue as we've gone along - way down there are three fun things:  a map of where all of you come from (a range that never fails to amaze me); the impressively named Live Traffic Feed, which shows when people arrive and from where; and - most germane at the moment - a counter that in an odd moment a few months after I started things up around here I threw in just to see the at-the-time dozen or so hits that would accrue in a given week (oh, ok - month).

Well, after five-years-and-a-bit, I was startled to notice earlier this week that that counter was approaching a minor milestone, and perhaps even by the time you read this will have rolled blithely past 249,999 and on into its second quarter million.  Oh, I know that that an awful lot of those hits are from bots and spiders (and, if the numbers are to be trusted, even more are from people looking for MARISA BERENSON NUDE), but still - kind of cool, no?

Even after all this time, it's still startling to think that there are people (or bots, or spiders - but a few people) from Vancouver and Burbank and São Paulo and Hong Kong (just a few recent stoppers-by) who will pop in and become, however briefly, a part of this little virtual salon.  In case you've gotten this far and are one of them - thank you.