50,000 BIG ONES: You may find this a little hard to believe, but sometime in the next week or so The Passing Parade will log in its 50,000 visitor. Now I know that might not seem like a lot to you; there are sites out there that log in that many people in a few minutes and manage to do so without showing pictures of naked women, if you can wrap your mind around such a possibility. But The Passing Parade has never catered to this lowest common denominator nor have we truckled after cheap popularity, although this has not been for want of trying. So for a blog like this, 50,000 is a nice number to arrive at.

I’d like to thank everyone who keeps coming by here, from Tat and Snoop, Russ and Dick, plus the folks over at Eternity Road and Burn magazine who keep popping over to find out more about that Akaky person and leave just as confused as when they arrived. I would also like to thank Ms. Roberta Vasquez, Playboy Magazine’s Miss November of 1984, who I mentioned in a post a few years ago and whose legion of fans still arrive here daily looking for her. Without Ms. Vasquez and her coterie of die-hard supporters, this blog’s numbers would still be somewhere in the low hundreds at this point. Again, I thank all of you.


I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize for the inconsistency with which I post here. The Passing Parade is a long essay blog and this format requires me to think of something new every time I sit down at my writing desk. As writing something new is an activity I prefer in the past rather than the present tense, this inevitably leads to delays in getting new material written, rewritten, edited, proofread, and then uploaded. My natural inclination to sloth does not help either, nor does my more or less constant fight with writer’s block, a fight that the block wins more times than not. But we are who we are, I fear, and we work (or don’t work) at our own pace. For those of you who would prefer a faster rate of delivery, again, my apologies.