Novennial

Nine years ago, George W. Bush's presidency still had a couple more years to run -- but an eager, young senator named Barack Obama had already declared his candidacy.  Nancy Pelosi had just taken the gavel as the first female Speaker of the House.  The British pound would top $2.00 in April, and the Dow was hovering just under 14,000 -- it hit its maximum of 14,164.53 in October, before everything began going sour.

All important events, certainly.  But the single most important event of 2007 was, undisputedly, the grand opening on March 20, 2007, of the blog Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner.

Looking back over the past 12 months, as we prepare for our tenth year, we see a lower than average number of posts being published, continuing what an economist would call a secular trend downward.  But the number of posts thus far in calendar year 2016 has been above average, which may or may not augur well for the future.

Turning away from quantity, we profess ourselves to be reasonably pleased with the quality of the product.  Movie and book reviews, always a popular topic, have been both numerous and -- as blogs go -- reasonably competent.  A new trend, which may be a bit worrisome, is a tendency toward personal reminiscence.  This trend is a clear marker of the publisher's advancing senility, and must be attacked vigorously in the coming year.

Generally, on these annual occasions, we can easily identify the most popular posts of the year past, for whatever insight that might give.  During the past year, however, few posts have stood out in popularity.  The number of hits recorded for each post has tended to be a function of  the time since its publication, not of any feature of the post that generated apparent reader excitement.

That said, the second most popular post of the year was a reproduction of a newspaper article that your author wrote in 1970 about his personal experiences with the joys of skydiving.  Other posts that tended to draw above average numbers of views dealt with a Los Angeles production of the musical Annie; memories of a chemistry set we owned as a kid, combined with thoughts about Oliver Sacks's own childhood chemistry experimentions; a review of the Andrew Smith novel Stick;  a discussion of a Colin Cotterill detective story that took place in Laos; a memory of listening to an NBC radio dramatization of a Ray Bradbury short story; and a child's hatred of having to get up and go outside the tent in the middle of a frigid night while camping -- in order to pee.

Weirdly enough -- and this really is weird -- the most popular post of the past year, in terms of actual number of views, was published exactly one year ago today.  It was entitled Octennial.  Go figure.

Onward and upward.  Our tenth year now begins.