Two thousand and six! Whatta year. Another thirty-and-one days gone by, and naturally enough, that means another monthly report, chockablock with uninteresting statistics, reminiscences of days gone by so recently that you haven’t had time to forget them, and of course, everyone’s favorite: goofy search strings. Hold on to your hats, be they homburg or cloche…

In December, I reported that approximately 12,000 enlightened souls visited the blog. This month, I’m pleased to report that 19,500 presumably slightly-more-benighted ones did. On January 25th there were in fact almost 4800 visitors, thanks to Zonk Slashdotting a fairly inconsequential post. Generally speaking, though, the number of visits saw a healthy trend upwards, and for the latter half of the month ran in the mid-2000’s every day.

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I’m off to have dinner with the family and Cory Doctorow. In honor of that occasion and the fact that I won’t be writing any lengthy essays tonight, here’s an open thread.

Alan sanded the house on Wales Avenue. It took six months, and the whole time it was the smell of the sawdust, ancient and sweet, and the reek of chemical stripper and the damp smell of rusting steel wool.

Alan took possession of the house on January 1, and paid for it in full by means of an e-gold transfer. He had to do a fair bit of hand-holding with the realtor to get her set up and running on e-gold, but he loved to do that sort of thing, loved to sit at the elbow of a novitiate and guide her through the clicks and taps and forms. He loved to break off for impromptu lectures on the underlying principles of the transaction, and so he treated the poor realtor lady to a dozen addresses on the nature of international currency markets, the value of precious metal as a kind of financial lingua franca to which any currency could be converted, the poetry of vault shelves in a hundred banks around the world piled with the heaviest of metals, glinting dully in the fluorescent tube lighting, tended by gnomish bankers who spoke a hundred languages but communicated with one another by means of this universal tongue of weights and measures and purity.

–opening paragraphs of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

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