Waldo, ever the cynic, just asked for some new towels when we told him about how traffic spiked up here at WLJ. All of a sudden the graph abandoned its nice, steady upward run and went whomp! like that signal from space in Contact. Doubling and redoubling.

We liked thinking it was our little blog's tipping point, that we'd reached blogging manhood- virality?- and that we'd be breathing down Andrew Sullivan's neck in a matter of years rather than centuries.

Anxious to find- and replicate- our success, we drilled down into Sitemeter and Google Analytics' reports and discovered an overwhelming amount of the overwhelming amount of traffic was targeting a post about Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr speaking at the Oxford Union.

"Why would that many people want to read about Bob Barr?" we wondered aloud.

"They wouldn't," Waldo snapped, returning to another column smearing the painter Jacoby.

We studied some more. Then it hit us. The Barr item listed him among some other speakers set for Trinity Term, including half a dozen TV and film stars.

It seems we've stumbled into being a true SC blog.

And sure enough, the numbers are back to the old average today.