Meanwhile, at this end of the blogosphere ...

Earlier this summer, we showed a chart of readers' visits in the previous week. This is a chart of visits over the past twelve months. Fascinating, isn't it?

We here at man with black hat have had three months so far this year that have exceeded four thousand visitors; January (4324, the highest in our ten-year history), March (4025), and July (4091). A few days ago, Father Zuhlsdorf of WDTPRS commented on a devoted Jesuit priest who passed away, and who did not get his dying wish for a Traditional Requiem Mass. In the comments section, yours truly related his own experience with the funeral for his father's passing. It seems that quite a few of you were curious about that, perhaps to see how it was possible to bring due reverence to a Funeral Mass using the Novus Ordo Missae (aka the "ordinary form").

Hey, anything we can do to help.

But what really got the staff and management of mwbh running for cover, was the attention gained by a little something we ran in May of last year. It seems that a Google search for "new orleans flood gates" turned up the heat on a piece entitled “Because a man’s home is his castle ...” The crackerjack team in our Research Department cannot begin to explain why, but this one got us 218 visits yesterday (our daily count usually falling between 100 and 120), on a day that we didn't publish anything, and we're still feeling the residual effects, enough that August is more likely than not to be another "four thousand plus" month.

Of course, nothing could beat our all-time daily record of 449 visits on the first of this month. That was awesome! Closer to the present, only two more days and 218 visits to go.

Our gratitude is there in any case.