Traffic Babbling, and a little Search Engine Strangeness

Yup, I'm posting fairly late at night, since I had some other stuff in the hopper until now, and I'm still rather awake. I don't like being awake these days. Being awake means wandering around The Store, having people say things like "Geez, man, you look tired!"

Anyhoo, November turned out to be a pretty good month in terms of traffic to the blog: it fell just short of setting a record for a single month (the current record is still held by last January), so thanks to everyone who either read Byzantium's Shores, linked Byzantium's Shores, read and linked Byzantium's Shores, yada yada yada. Maybe with the election being over, people are wanting to read the kind of sharp, incisive cultural commentary inane blathering about Star Wars and other geeky items that I provide.

And here's a couple of items from everybody's favorite occasional blogging meme, strange search engine requests that brought folks here:

:: I'm in Google's Top Twenty for "UFOS EDMUND FITZGERALD AIR FORCE".

:: I'm Hit #100 on Google for "Famous Viola Works". Actually, this isn't a weird search request at all. I've actually always liked the sound of a solo viola, being as it's between a cello and a violin (now there's a bit of revelatory insight!). The most notable works I know of featuring solo viola are Mozart's Sinfonia contertante for solo violin, solo viola, and orchestra (one of my very favorite classical works of all time), and Berlioz's second symphony, Harold In Italy. Berlioz wrote Harold at the behest of Nicolo Paganini, who had just bought a Stradivarius viola and wanted a showpiece for it. Berlioz's work, though, turned out to not be a showpiece, and Paganini never played it. There's also a viola concerto by Carl Stamitz that I've heard a couple of times.

:: OK, this one's weird: On Yahoo, I'm Number Eleven for "Pictures of Hillbilly Inbreds". I don't want to know why I am so listed. I really do not. The only hillbilly inbreds with whom I am familiar are the disturbing folks in the X-Files episode "Home". (Man, that was a great episode -- one of the most unnerving things that show ever produced.) Anyway, for the record, I am not up on hillbillies these days.

:: I'm Number Three on Google for the question, "Who played the role of Edmond Dontes in the movie Count of Monte Cristo". This is interesting to me in two ways: first, in that this person doesn't know about IMDB.com; and second, the Google results screen actually quotes the part of whatever post in which I talked about The Count of Monte Cristo, and the quote therein provides the answer. Yet, the person apparently clicked through. Odd.

That's all for now. Thanks for visiting, everybody!