I see that the little counter installed on the right hand side of this page turned over one million, five hundred thousand sometime yesterday or today.
I installed that counter in 2010 -- about six years after starting this blog -- on the understanding that there are always Googlebots and webspiders and who knows what-all browsing through the internet at any moment. So I have never assumed that numbers on the counter are a reliable indicator of actual readers attending to pages of this history blog.
The counter has been pretty puzzling to me all along, in fact. When first set up, it rattled along tallying maybe 10,000 pageviews a month until late 2014/early 2015, when it soared to a peak of 150,000 pageviews a month. And then it dropped off just as steeply to the 10,000 range once again: still astonishing to me, but hardly matching its brief glories.
Was this just a webspider frenzy? The Russians preparing to highjack everything on the North American internet in the service of Donald Trump's installation as their man in Washington? Some unnoticed temporary global fascination with Canadian history? Who knows?
That left me even more dubious about the meaning of the counter's numbers. They are like like those astronomical numbers that used to be displayed at McDonald's drive-through. Billions? Really?
But what the hell. A million and a half served at this little hamburger stand still has a nice feel to it.
Thanks to all you real people for being some undetermined part of them.
