The Columnist Manifesto

I love how you can sign up to get all sorts of data about one's own insignificant presence on the internet. Site meter, for example, provides a darling little world map with dots showing the global location of people who have clicked onto my blog.

(Can you imagine W the boy President in the "sit[uation] room" looking at a big world map, and saying, "No, we can't bomb Teheran... they love my blog there!")

It turns out that Flickr also has a hit counter, and yesterday I checked out my "Most Popular Photos" (by number of views):

# 1, with 562 views:



and #2, with 560 views:



and a very distant #3, with 127 views:



If you read my blog, you know that photo #1 is a billboard in Warsaw illustrating a comment I made about the subtlety of Polish advertizing. #2, a big glass of iced coffee, is my alter ego -- or my avatar, anyway. # 3 is a then-and-now montage of a Maginot Line fort.

What to make of all this? People have clicked on these photos when they see them on my blog. But why? Let me offer three possible interpretations.

A) People want to get a better look at the model's middle bracelet in photo #1, because they might want to order one. And people want to get a better look at the surface of the iced coffee because they think they might see an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

B) #1 and #2 are my two hottest photos ever posted on this blog. Period. #3 happened to attract World War II geeks, who prowl the internet in surprising numbers.

C) #2 is my avatar and appears on the top left corner of my blog every day. People click on it to see my singularly uninformative profile. #1 happens to be titled "sex1" and so comes up on lots of Google image searches.

The correct answer? B, of course.