Am I famous now?

Wow! The number of views for this humble blog for September is 163,988. This is more than three times the previous monthly record of 48,646 set back in July. The views started picking up at the start of the month, averaging roughly 4K views a day. On September 20 the average jumped to roughly 9K a day. In the last 30 days over 100K (61%) views were from the US, over 30K (18%) from Singapore, 23K (14%) from Hong Kong, nearly 6.9K (4%) from Mexico, and over 1.2K (less than 1%) from Britain. There were views from at least 15 other countries. Since I asked Blogger to keep track of statistics in July of 2010 this blog has now passed 1 million views, currently at 1,058,937. More than 15% of recorded views are in the last month. Until 2023 most months had fewer than 4K views and 12K or 15K views in a month were a big deal to me. The current rise in views started in May 2023. I mentioned these numbers to my friend and debate partner over supper together. He asked if I knew what triggered this sudden rise, such as a big site mentioning this one. I don’t see anything in the stats Blogger shows me that would explain this jump. This big jump in views did not change another aspect of this blog. There have been all of three comments since 2020 and only 235 comments in the nearly 18 year history of this blog – that’s excepting spam comments, which I promptly delete. I do appreciate comments and may respond in a following post. In the nearly 18 years of this blog – I’ll mark that anniversary in about six weeks – this is post 5,528. The main page of this blog has a “Best of the Nest” list, what I consider the most important posts. Those posts are getting a lot of views right now. Nine of the top ten posts with the highest views are from this list with view counts from 63 to 53 in the last week and 294 to 262 in the last month. My Sunday movie was Diciannove, which means “nineteen” in Italian. I saw it at the Detroit Film Theater. Leonardo is the nineteen year old of the title. At the start of the film he is leaving home, which is Palermo, to go to college. He first goes to London, where his sister is and where he is to study business. But after a night of clubbing he decided he’d rather study Italian literature in Siena. In Siena he really gets into the books, but thinks the professor is boring and clueless (I’d agree to the boring part). He pushes away attempts to be his friends. Then what is he supposed to do? He’s at the age where he feels he’s no longer a teenager but not quite an adult. He tries hookups, but doesn’t get very far. He admires young men he sees on the street (is he gay?) and goes to parties with women (is he straight?). At the end of the year he hasn’t figured out much, which is typical for someone who is nineteen. DFT offers a sheet with an introduction to its movies. This one says don’t expect the usual story arc of encountering a difficulty and conquering or at least learning from it. Yeah, Leonardo does learn a few things in the year (such as some vegetables rot if not eaten quickly), but in that year he hasn’t done much in the process of coming of age. Again, typical. Actual discussion of news will have to wait for another post.