4k : yippi-ti-yi-yay

Today this blog's Sitemeter counter hit a whopping 4000, after a mere, um, 9 months or so of operation. I guess that's sort of impressive, so long as we don't compare the numbers with any of those other blogs out there. Well, whatever. I'm not a competitive person.

I decided earlier today that I'd do a post all about whatever brought the 4000th visitor here, within reason. Then I decided that in case that reason wasn't interesting enough to sustain an entire post, I'd cover a selection of recent reasons people ended up here. Other than people who show up via "Next Blog", I mean, since those generally merit a post of their own. That's basically what I've ended up doing here, more or less. Or that was the starting point for this post, at any rate.

Recently I've gotten a decent number of visitors here via Technorati. Mostly it's because I link somewhere, Technorati picks it up, and someone follows the link back here, for some reason. So here are a few of the recent backlinkees (to coin a stupid word), plus the occasional thing of interest that I ran across via Technorati while checking out the backlinks, plus stuff I found on Del.icio.us in connection with other items here, plus whatever, all in no particular order. Italic means potentially NSFW, depending, as always, on where you work.

• Portland Food & Drink
  
• Utterly Boring
  
• NewCritters.com (see blogroll)
  
• Hairy Museum of Natural History
  
• Touch Your Blog
  
• Viviane's Sex Carnival
  
• Shirking Responsibility
  
• oddsnark, a surly sports blog. It's nice to see a post titled "Malkin has ways of making you eat", and it's about Evgeni (the hockey player), not Michelle.
  
• The Thingamablog
  
• The Awkwardness of Juxtaposition
  
• Amused Muse
  
• haha.nu
  
• The Literary Courtesan
  
• FSM Hatemail. That's FSM as in Flying Spaghetti Monster. Unsurprisingly, He gets lots of hatemail from fundies.
  
• SIGFPE
  
• Freakgirl
  

Miscellaneous, primarily non-Technorati items: Some interesting search engine queries, plus other stuff I ran across while researching this post, plus whatever:

• Recently I've gotten a number of google hits for the word "yuppiestan", which was mystifying until I did my own search on the term. While I used the word in reference to Portland's Pearl District, the searches seem to stem from a recent Ha'aretz opinion piece griping about how the affluent folks in Tel Aviv managed to sit out the war in Lebanon.
  
• A scary LA Times article about the guy behind the "Girls Gone Wild" empire. What a creep. Eew!
  
• You must watch The White Orchid, an obscure and deeply subversive jungle-adventure-love-triangle movie from 1954. This item actually has nothing at all to do with search hits, but I just saw the movie, and I thought it was great, so I'm passing it along. I might do a post about it later, come to think of it.
  
• Dolphins: not so smart after all? Is nothing sacred?
  
• More than anything else right now, I keep getting search hits for Merche Romero, the Portuguese TV personality, with most people searching for the phrase "Merche the Reject", which is the name of a rather vicious anti-Merche blog out there. I happened to mention it once, briefly, because of one of those "Next Blog" things, and the search hits just keep on coming, months later. It's weird. I don't know anything about Ms. Romero personally, but I think the fact that so many people are searching for a hate blog is really kind of icky. Don't you people have anything better to do?
  
• A few off-the-wall hits recently, for the phrases "we feel fine", "my postal code", "why modern art", and the words aliens+ufos+apocalypse.
  
• A couple of history tidbits: a bit about the phrase "here there be dragons" on old maps, and more seriously, a piece about Germany in 1933, as fascism was starting to take hold.
  

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Updated: A few more items to pass along. I really didn't want to do yet another bullet-point item post, since I've done too many of those lately, and I don't want to fall into a rut, so I'm just going to tack these on to the end of this post.

• When I posted this, I did get one interesting hit via "Next Blog", an interesting blog called The Age of Uncertainty.
  
• Also found on the interwebs, if you like collected eclectica and you don't think I'm doing a very good job of collecting (which is reasonable, I suppose), you might prefer the daily items over at Bifurcated Rivets.
  
• FrinkTank points us at the source of some entertaining spam they got recently, advertising yet another "herbal male enhancement" product called -- get this -- "Ejaculoid". *Snort* *giggle*. The funny thing is that several of the herbs mentioned (such as Eurycoma longifolia) are used for more or less the same purpose by various SE Asian tribes. So it's quack medicine, but with serious ethnobotany behind it. Weird.
  
• I occasionally post not-safe-for-work links here, although I generally aim to keep this blog SFW itself. It's interesting the sort of traffic this generates. I usually have little or no interest in where visitors come from, but I've noticed a disturbing trend, disturbing because it plays into stereotypes I'd really rather not give credence to. Whenever I get visitors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, or other states in the region, almost invariably they're looking for porn. And really, I have very little here to offer them, but they keep showing up, I dunno why. I think it's sort of like Victorian England: Repress people that much, and they'll end up thinking of nothing else, night and day.
  
• Pics of cool houses: Robert Bruno's Steel House, and house designs by designer & fantasy illustrator Roger Dean. Because straight lines are for chumps.
  
• From Neatorama: Rollerblading in an abandoned water park.
  
• In mathland, there's now a page at Wikipedia about large countable ordinals, a subject I've blabbered about here now and then. There's also an old Discover piece giving an enjoyable popular treatment of surreal numbers.
  
• A lot of hits in the last few days for my Kelly Butte post. Seems that somebody's found a way inside the bunker. Sounds cool, and scary.