The Snake Eating Its Tail

There's a been a lot of talk lately about Precedent Shitgibbon's first 100 days in office. This post is not about that.

I'm more concerned about the last 30 days. And by concerned I mean overjoyed.

April 2017 saw the highest traffic numbers for RoundSeventeen since this blog was started about 9 years ago. Nine years? Wow, as my friend Mark Monteiro once noted, I really do have diarrhea of the brain.

Last month, for the very first time, there were more than 20,000 page views. We had come tantalizingly close in the past, hitting numbers like 19, 087, 19, 254 and 19, 457 -- that was the previous high mark.

In April we didn't just nudge past 20, 000 we went rocketing past it like Precedent Shitgibbon's disapproval ratings.

Maybe that doesn't do anything for you.

But my life is pathetic, filled with little joy and even less in the way of validation, so I'm popping the cork on that bottle of sparkling Apple Cider that's been sitting in my garage refrigerator since it went unopened at my daughter's Bat Mitzvah party.

If you're a regular reader of RoundSeventeen you might be wondering what accounts for the sudden surge in viewership.

"He's not funnier."

"He's always whining about advertising."

"His political rants are facile and long in the tooth."

Guilty. Guilty. And very guilty.

The answer is, as it always is, algorithms.

Recently, I was working onsite in an office where my Apple Mail was unable to connect to the server. Subsequently, I was forced to use my rarely-used Gmail account.

There, I noticed a shitload of spam from a mail order bride company in China. Thinking this could be kung pao grist for another book, not unlike my Nigerian spam book, I decided to respond to one of the AsiaDate promos.

And surprise, surprise, Mingyu Lee, a 22 year old cosmetology student from Quang Lo province, was looking a for a 44 year old freelance copywriter to make her dreams come true. And so, it turns out, were a thousand of her friends.

Who knew bald Jewish guys with big noses could be so popular?

Well, now the bots have taken over. Their ads are all over the blog. And the traffic is way, way up. Of course, the numbers and the statistics are all fake and manufactured. But it's 2017 and we have a fobbing,  pottle-deep moldwarp in the White House, so why should that matter?

Besides, according to the incredibly deferential Mingyu:

"Mr. Rich, you are so handsome and verile, with much strong knowledge to share with picnic by cold babbling brook."

Indeed Mingyu, indeed.