Early this morning, O Dearly Beloved, while the East Coast of the United States slumbered (or at least I did), some poor benighted soul clicked an unsuspecting key on their computer, and the 1,000,000th page of this opinion emporium was summoned from the ether into view. Now, put in context with the pageview monsters of the econoblogosphere—much less the ultra-monsters of the internet itself, to whom the popularity of the most visited business and economics site extant is but a pimple on the ass of irrelevancy—one million pageviews is indisputably small beer. But it took four years and four months for me to reach this numerically impressive but otherwise meaningless marker, and I intend to lord it over you for at least a few paragraphs more.My achievement, if I do say so myself, is all the more impressive (at least in my eyes) because I accomplished it while violating almost every possible stricture of financial blogging known to man, the most important of which include writing punchy, concise, frequent blog posts about stuff one clearly understands. In addition, I employed language not normally seen outside P.G. Wodehouse novels and the 18th century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, liberally sprinkled with blistering invective strong enough to make paint peel. I salted my prose with arcane allusions and abstruse quotations of dubious relevance. I illustrated my posts with arty, recondite images whose pertinence to the subject at hand was often obscure and usually tenuous at best. I denied everyone the ability to comment on my pearls of wisdom, which I believe is considered a capital offense in the echoing halls of Conventional Bloggery. And finally, to compound the degree of readerly difficulty, I swathed the entire site in enough twaddle and misdirection—most notably by refusing to label any topic with search terms that would be easy to find and use—to make even the most tenacious student of the Torah toss it over to study Dianetics.
Given all that, I have only one question for all of you: Are you guys effin' masochists, or what?
Anyway, I suppose I should try to summon a shred of gratitude from the dismal depths of my curmudgeonly heart, at least for the fact that there have been so many of you who seem to take pleasure from my monstrous self-indulgence. But now is not the time to rest upon your lexical laurels, Dear Friends, for there are new mountains to climb. In particular, I remain several hundred thousand visitors short of one million, and I have promised various ex-girlfriends and securities regulators that I will strip naked, paint my dangly bits blue, and streak down the Washington Mall reciting each and every provision of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act at the top of my lungs once I achieve that mark.
So hop to it, please. The monkeys I hired to click pages have proved remarkably unreliable, and we all know business school majors and MBAs are utterly useless in this regard.
See you at the next mile marker. Cheerio.
© 2011 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.
