The JimH Blog owes a lot to beautiful women who are willing to take off their clothes. (If you got here from Google and you’re in a hurry, the answer is TASSEL. Otherwise, read on.)
There are many ways people stumble into this blog, but for the past couple of weeks and especially in the past few days, most visitors have arrived from MSN Search, Yahoo, or Google looking for information about naked women. That's not so surprising on the web, but in this case most of the visitors didn’t know that naked women were what they were interested in.
The secret to getting lots of search hits is show up in the top ten or so results for a phrase many people want to investigate. If the phrase is too common, insignificant blogs like this don’t stand a chance. If the phrase is too obscure, nobody will type it in. Lately lots of people have been typing in "ecdysiast’s accouterment" because it turned up in a New York Times crossword puzzle, I liked the clue, and I blogged about it. Click here to see the original post including the meaning of the phrase.
I got many hits the first few days as puzzlers struggled with this bizarre clue. Then recently I've been getting around 1000 more search hits a day. The NYT syndicates the puzzles, but if you get them somewhere other than The Grey Lady, they arrive a week later. So thank you, Puzzle Master Will Shortz for drawing so many people to my humble blog. I’m sure they’ll all become loyal fans.
To the puzzlers of the world who found themselves here, I have something important to say: there is no shame in using the web to help solve crosswords. After all, you know Will and the gang use the web to come up with those perverse clues.
Finally, if you read the comments of the original post, you’ll notice that
Larry Osterman knew what an ecdysiast was without having to look it up. He claims it was because of his love of musical theatre. Uh huh.
Actually, it IS because of my love of musical theater. Gypsy is one of my all time favorites. I’ve got both the Rosalind Russell and the Bette Midler version on laserdisc, and I saw the Tyne Daly twice within two months (the first time was at the Kennedy Center when it was on tryouts, the second was on Broadway the week after it opened (in Row H, Valorie and I were seated behind Mary Tyler Moore).
And there’s no way of missing the line “The paper accuses me of being an ecdysiast, so I looked it up in the dictionary. An ecdysiast is something that sheds its skin. At these prices, I’m an ecdysiast!”
Unfortunately, the only version I have ripped (the original soundtrack) omits the dialog (the tyne daily and bette midler versions don’t), so I’ve remembered that from memory (although I could check the script, I’ve got it at home).
When I landed in Seattle, my first thought was "This town needs a musical theater company". Now, we have two, and both of them are flourishing (The Fifth Avenue Musical Theater Company, and The Village Theater). Valorie and I give annually to the 5th Avenue, and we've been season subscribers there since the second season. I don't count Broadway at the Paramount, because it's just a venue for road companies - they don't do any original work.
And I LOVE the fact that the Fifth Avenue does original works and stages its own shows (the recent productions of Hair, Smokey Joes Cafe, and My Fair Lady, and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum were all locally produced).
Posted by: Larry Osterman | January 03, 2005 at 01:53 PM