Five Hundred Posts

Five hundred posts.

No I’m not talking about building a fence between the US and Mexico, I’m talking about this blog. With this post, the one you are actually reading at this very moment, I have reached a milestone: 500 TOTO blog posts.

To understand how incredible this is imagine laying out all these posts end to end. If the wind didn’t blow them away, they would be 500 pages long. Given that a page is 11 inches long and 8 ½ inches wide, that would be five thousand five hundred inches long and four thousand two hundred and fifty inches wide, which, if an inch were equal to a mile, would be enough to cover entire continent of the United States. The entire continent!

But that ain’t nothin’! If an inch were equal to 5000 miles, 500 blog posts would stretch from the earth to the moon! Can you imagine that? If not for reality, I could claim to have written enough blogs to paper the entire distance from here to the moon. I’m humbled by this, truly I am.

When I started TOTO a few years ago I never imagined it would become the international phenomenon it is today. And when I say international, I mean international. Let me explain…

A few weeks ago I signed up with Google Analytics to track how many people visit this blog, and from whence they come. As of this morning I have over 2093 readers in the US and three in Yemen. There are also seventy-two Canadians, two Saudis, one Iraqi, two Egyptians, and two Chinese reading TOTO as well. Add to this an assortment of Europeans, Africans, Indians, Australians, and not as yet illegal immigrants from Mexico, and Latin and South America, and you can see that TOTO has gone global. No one in Israel reads it though.

I even heard that President Obama reads every TOTO post, though I admit to having heard it only from myself when I thought it up a moment ago. Still the rumor is out there now and it is only a matter of time before Yemen is convinced that I have the ear of the president. (Please, my Yemeni friends, this is an English idiom, a figure of speech, so don’t take it literally. I don’t mean that I have the actual ear of the President, only that he listens to me, which of course he doesn’t, so don’t write in requesting a piece of the ear for some anti-American ritual or whatnot.)

Anyway, when I realized that I would actually make it to 500 posts, I thought about sending TOTO over Reichenbach falls (look it up), and putting an end to the whole thing. Five hundred is a good number, and if I continued I’d have to reach one thousand posts before having another chance to end this with a sense of numeric elegance. Writing another five hundred posts is a huge commitment, and I’m not sure I want to make it.

So as with all big decisions in my life I have decided to turn this one over to others rather than make it myself. I am leaving the fate of this blog up to you, my readers. Especially my three Yemeni readers. If you want this blog to continue, let me know. Write your decision, yea or nay, in the Comments section of the blog, and I, your loyal servant, will act accordingly.

So it is up to you. I’ll report the results tomorrow.