A virtual ticker-tape parade is clearly called for

 

Congratulations to SC blogger Cotton Boll Conspiracy, which has clocked up its 500,000th viewer during its four year sojourn in the the blogdom.

CBC is one of those consistently well-written blogs that, once discovered, cannot be ignored for long. Like Arts & Letters Daily, it becomes part of one's intellectual routine. Its author is, as they would have said in 18th century Britain, "a man of parts," and it shows in the remarkable array of his post subjects.

CBC does, however, fret a little amid its odometer-driven revels that its missionary work on what, again, in Britain in the 18th century, they were calling The Dark Continent, has been less than a boffo smash.

(On the other hand, CBC is big in The Channel Islands. Go figure. It's one of life's imponderables. Jerry Lewis in France. David Hasselhoff in Germany. South Korean rapper PSY anywhere.)

Waldo, typing furiously in his bath to remain ahead of "the Build Your Own Fire-Ant Farm blog and the Musings on Neo-Pelagianism blog" (both of which CBC is just crushing in the reader stats) sometimes frets a bit about the same sort of thing, although from a different perspective. Waldo takes it as a given that everyone should know what he has on his mind all the time, on all subjects, and so wonders why the public's interest in ant farms and neo-Pelagianism, to name but two examples, stubbornly refuses to die. Not to mention a certain, well, dearth of reader love emanating from parts of the globe. Like CBC, Waldo's African readership is huddled along the Mediterranean, in the lands of the Arab Spring, in South Africa, and in the lands of the Sahel. There are big blank bits on the map where readers ought to be gathered around their wireless sets.

And yet, in other, unexpected, places, there are readers. Waldo puzzles over those solitary blips on tiny islands in the Indian Ocean; followings in Iceland and India; the lonely, exceedingly bored Reader of Fernando Po (as Graham Greene might have styled him); and the inexplicable absence of anyone among the even more lonely, exceedingly bored denizens of Antarctic research stations among the readership.

And there's the Mystery of The Top Ten. What could make the residents of the US, Germany, UK, Canada, Russia, France, Netherlands, South Korea, Slovenia and Ukraine, in that order, populate Waldo's most frequent sources of nation-state traffic?

Such of the imponderables of bloggery. And may Cotton Boll Conspiracy's readers enjoy many hundreds of thousands more visits.