a million six? jesus chri…

While I was neglecting Uncle Crappy last week, I failed to notice that I — we — had passed a milestone of sorts. Tonight, while checking the site’s stats, I found that Uncle Crappy had reached the 5,000 hits plateau. We’re at 5,073 as we speak.

While that figure would probably guarantee me membership in the Baseball Hall of Fame, it’s small potatoes in the blog world, where some of my favorites get 5,000 hits in a week. But for someone who started out essentially in a vacuum — if you’ll recall, I didn’t even tell anybody about this until I’d been doing it for a little more than a year — I think it’s pretty cool.

So here’s what we’re going to do. Y’all know about me, but what about you? The site meter package tells me a bunch of cool shit — like the time someone was directed to Uncle Crappy after doing a Google search for “I want a fucking weather-predicting owl” or the time I realized that someone with an IP address from the U.S. Department of Justice was reading my blog.

Not that I have anything to worry about. In the legal sense. Really.

But it also tells me more general stuff about when you read and from where, how you got here and how often you visit. Here’s what I’ve learned:

• My biggest month was last November (421 hits), and biggest week was the third week of that month (163). That tells me that I’m not the only one interested in the Michigan game.
• I get the most hits between 11 p.m. and midnight (360), followed closely by midnight to 1 a.m. (340). You people need to go to bed; we’re not getting any younger, you know.
• The biggest day of the week is Wednesday (981). The slowest days are Saturday (398) and Sunday (420). That’s good — Uncle Crappy doesn’t like to do much writing on weekends.
• The overwhelming majority of you live in the United States (4,619). Next on the geographic list is Canada (133) and Switzerland (60). There was a time when Switzerland and Canada were neck-and-neck … this can only mean that Roy is slacking.
• I’ve also received single hits from Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Croatia, Finland, Hong Kong, Estonia, Uzbekistan, South Africa, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Belgium, Iran, Netherlands Antilles, Luxembourg and Egypt. Christ, I’m not certian I could find Estonia or Uzbekistan on a map.
• Most of you know where to find Uncle Crappy. Only 1,956 hits have come via referrals from other sites or searches. I should thank John, Kristi and Anne (wherever she is) for the large numbers of hits that are directed my way from their respective pages.
• If you got here via a search, chances are good that you were looking for one of the words in the blog title (“crappy,” 142 hits; “uncle,” 106) or in K2’s Mystery Luv skis (63), which were in no way responsible for The Wife’s accident in Colorado. You also might have come here in response to my unfortunate, and completely accidental, reference to The Schnit Radio Show (16), which I still know nothing about. I’ve received 15 hits from people either looking for info about our esteemed Grandhog or who just don’t type well. My friend, Pulitzer-winner Joe Mahr, has generated a total of 10 hits, although I’m convinced that most came directly from him. There’s also interest in Ambridge, Upper Arlington, rutabagas, Phish, fucking (not sure if that’s reflective of my readers or my language) and Mitch Albom, he of substandard journalistic ethics. And five times, someone has found Uncle Crappy by typing “httpunclecrappyblogspotcom.” Geez, don’t you remember what your English teacher said? Punctuation counts, boys and girls.

As I said before, 5,000 hits feels pretty good. I couldn’t have done it without you. Actually I could have, but it would have taken much, much longer. Thanks for helping out.