SELF-REFERENTIAL REAL ART NEWS
My Blog Nearly Triples
It's One Day Record

Today, Real Art got 110 hits. Check out this cool statistic from Site Meter:





Now this is pretty weird, because this blog usually averages anywhere between ten and twenty hits per day. I've been doing a bit better lately but, as the picture below shows, today's total is quite the spike:





My previous one day record was forty hits or so sometime last summer. When I checked out how it was doing earlier this afternoon, I was pretty blown away to see that that I had eighty-something, and there were still hours to go before midnight.

What could be causing this weird upturn in Real Hits?

Of course, most of the hits were Google searches, and the vast, vast majority of those searches were looking for this phrase: "So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls." This is what al-Qaeda terrorists proclaimed on camera before they beheaded 26 year old Nick Berg, an American worker kidnapped in Iraq. Pretty creepy stuff. So creepy, in fact, that I didn't even really feel like saying anything about it here at Real Art, especially after seeing a portion of the video, which is cut, thankfully, before the decapitation. In its own way, it's much more depressing than the American abuses of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. But I did see an opportunity to link to the story, so I did. Little did I know that my little link would provide the motivation for a veritable cyber-dogpile on Real Art.

I think people were trying to find the full, uncut video, although I really don't know why the hell anybody wants to see that sort of thing. Go figure. The cut video I saw is quite painful to watch by itself. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the upsurge in hits, and Site Meter shows that some of those people actually stayed and read for a while. Cool.

But what the hell is it that has made so many people want to see something so horrible?

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