Michael Lopez, who was upset a little while back about a school official’s idea of proper graduation attire, is now dumbfounded that that post got some attention, including from me.

I understand where he’s coming from, really. In the roughly 1.5 years I’ve been writing Byzantium’s Shores, my three biggest spikes in traffic came thusly:

1. On April Fool’s Day I took a Steven Den Beste post, ran it through Babelfish into Japanese and back again, and posted the results, calling it “Even More Turgid Steven Den Beste”, as a knock-off of the “Shorter Steven Den Beste” that’s occasionally flitted around Blogistan. Matthew Yglesias noticed it, and linked it. (He was doing SSDB honors at the time.) Much traffic ensued.

2. A few months before that, SDB himself watched Attack of the Clones and wrote a review that sent me into spasms of geek-like fury, the results of which were channeled into two posts here — which SDB generously linked with one of those “So-and-so comments” updates at the end of his review (along with a “Maybe Jaquandor should lighten up” suggestion). Much traffic ensued.

3. Last summer, one day I was doing a lot of printing one day, and I decided to kill time by writing capsule reviews of every James Bond movie. Somehow this got noticed and spread around a bit, which was my first big spike.

You never know what’s going to get attention, really — or rather, what’s going to get enough attention by the people who are already reading you that they comment on it in their own blogs, thus sending folks who are reading them to see what’s up with you. In this specific case, I share Michael’s annoyance at this school official’s actions, and I thought I’d spread that feeling around a bit, with a credit to the original source. (I had already been planning to link his earlier Star Wars Fanfic post, and then decided to fold them together.) I’ve written posts that I thought for sure would get noticed and linked by someone, or at least generate some comments on site, but nothing happens; I’ve written other posts that are basically toss-offs that get noticed and heavily commented.

So, Michael, I understand what you’re getting at. But look at it this way: it may have been a post of yours that is “devoid of intellectual content” that got that attention in the form of linkage, but someone had to be reading you all along to happen upon that post and link it in the first place. That is why you’re doing all the other heavy-lifting. It may not generate a lot of linkage, but it generates readers. And in Blogistan, readers are where linkage eventually comes from, even when it comes like a bolt of lightning from a clear and cloudless sky.

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A couple of movie notes today.

:: Sometimes I’ll watch a film I remember positively from many years ago, and discover that my earlier feelings weren’t quite warranted; other times I’ll find that I didn’t appreciate the film enough way back when. A case-in-point of the latter is From Here to Eternity, which I watched back when I was a senior in high school but have not seen since. I remember it being a terribly gritty and moving film, and my memories are pretty much accurate. I love the way all of the lives depicted in that film come together at the end, even if the people living them don’t all know each other and never have a scene together. The Deborah Kerr character, for instance, is deeply affected in the end by the actions of Montgomery Clift’s Robert E. Lee Prewitt, whose actions are shaped by Frank Sinatra’s Maggio…and all of them are affected by Burt Lancaster, et cetera. There isn’t a false note in that movie, and I love the grim sense of futility at the end, and of waste, when all of the struggles and character-dramas in the film are rendered moot by the events of December 7, 1941. I haven’t seen too many WWII films, so I don’t have a very large sample on which to base this, but this is still my favorite film of that war.

:: I knew I’d love Castle In the Sky. No other reaction was even possible. I can’t conceive of not liking one of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. So, I’m sure it’s totally anticlimactic for me to report that yes, I loved it. It’s the most straight-forward of Miyazaki’s films, with less of the ambiguity between good and evil that so marks his later efforts like Princess Mononoke, but sometimes it’s just fun to watch a pure, nasty villain at work who needs no other reason for being bad than that he is bad. And the visuals? My God, I’d love to see this movie on a big screen someday. Those airships are absolutely stunning in their invention, and if I say that Miyazaki has the same gift for visual worldbuilding that George Lucas has, I mean that as a high compliment. Miyazaki doesn’t just create worlds that seem real, he creates worlds that I want to live in. I’d love to go to the city in Kiki’s Delivery Service; I’d love to visit the forests and mountains of Princess Mononoke; and I’d be moved to tears if I could see the caverns and the airships of Castle in the Sky. And if I saw Laputa itself? I’d surely never stop weeping.

:: One cautionary note for parents of small children: when you get to the point where your kid is no longer afraid of the bathtub, and you want to keep it that way, don’t let her stay in the room while you watch Titanic. Just trust me on this one, OK?

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Everything you ever wanted to know about Queen Nefertiti and what may be her mummy, but were afraid to ask.

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In the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom that is unfolding outside my patio door, the baby robins who are nesting in my hanging ivy plant are growing quite nicely. Now they actually look like birds, with feathers and wings which they are spreading. This is a nice change from the way they looked just after hatching, when they were basically three blobs of pink flesh with tiny beaks. They also chirp a lot when the mother and father bring worms and bugs and whatnot for them to eat. What surprises me is how soft their hungry chirping is; I figured three chirping baby robins would be a lot louder. As it is, we’ve got the patio door open and they’re about eighteen inches from that door, but our TV in the living room can drown them out.

Today’s funny development with the robins is that the babies seem to be getting a bit tired of their usual vantage point (having their mother’s rump atop their heads). They’re starting to push and try to stick their heads out, and the mother keeps hunkering down and giving an unmistakable scowl.

The unfunny development, though, is the way the parents dive-bomb us every time we actually attempt to walk out onto our own patio. I’ve tried pointing out that they are our guests and not the other way around, but they just don’t see it that way. Or maybe they just don’t understand English. I mean, it’s not like robins are cats.

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Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen this guy mentioned, at least occasionally, as a possible Supreme Court successor to Chief Justice Rehnquist.

Yet another one of those “How can I keep writing fiction, given that the real world is so much more screwy than anything I can up with” moments….

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I’ve been following this whole business of California attempting to recall the election of Governor Gray Davis, and I have to admit I’m a bit fuzzy on the whole concept of a recall. It seems to me that a recall process should exist for really extraordinary examples of incompetence, or perhaps even outright negligence. But it also seems to me that if an elected official takes office and then converts everything into a giant, bungled mess, well, that’s what the next election is for.

Of course, I’m not well-versed at all in California politics, so I’m not sure if Davis is really that bad or not, or really what the deal is here. But I have noted that I have yet to encounter a single person who really likes this guy. Of course Republicans can’t stand him, but every Democrat I’ve seen write about Davis just kind-of grumblingly supports the guy. It’s amazing how high up people can rise even when they have the handicap of not being liked.

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Mac Diva gave me a mention in regard to my post a few days ago about her recent victory in the New Blog Showcase contest. (Lord, that’s a lot of links in one sentence….)

I just want to clarify one thing: In my post, I wasn’t really taking Mac Diva to task for winning the contest, which she did, fair and sqaure. Nor was I taking N.Z. Bear to task for anything. I was just whining a bit, pure and simple. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that Mac Diva should have been disqualified from the contest on the basis that when she launched her blog, she had something of a built-in reader base via her months of commenting on high-profile blogs like Eschaton. Digby had the same basic advantage when he launched Hullabaloo, after all (even though Digby has apparently left the planet surface in a spaceship he boarded near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming).

It happens. If you are a friend of a person who happens to run a high-profile blog, and you launch a blog of your own, then you’ve got a big jump on the majority of bloggers who simply jumped in with few (or zero) acquaintances in Blogistan, like yours truly. Personal connections can figure as much in Blogistan as anywhere in real life.

So, for folks like me, it’s a case of “Tough titty said the kitty”. Which is as it should be, and which is why I admitted at the outset of that post that I was whining. But it’s my blog, I can whine if I want to!

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Kevin Drum and Atrios are excited about the upcoming release this fall of Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Quicksilver, which is a “prequel” of sorts to his brilliant Cryptonomicon.

But I feel it my solemn duty to point out that, if these two fellows were reading Byzantium’s Shores, they would have known this more than a month ago.

C’mon, guys! I do provide the occasional valuable service to my readers!

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It’s interesting how the Ecosystem works, by counting not just general permalinks, but also the more transitory links to specific articles that come and go. That’s how, by taking a week off for vacation, Kevin Drum managed to fall from number five (I think) to number ten. So, not only did Kevin not produce anything new in that period to maintain his incoming article links, but as other bloggers kept on going, their earlier links to his articles in turn fell off their main pages.

(I don’t think, though, that the Ecosystem will count different links to the same post on another blog, from the same blog. So, if Aaron were to link the same post of mine twice, but in two different posts, I don’t think that would count as two incoming links, for Ecosystem purposes. But I may be wrong here.)

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Michael Lopez is a tad irritated that a school principal would dare challenge a handful of students who showed up to their graduation ceremonies inappropriately dressed.

Just how were they dressed? T-shirts with profanity on them? Ripped jeans? Tennis shoes? Hair painted purple?

Nope. Their “inappropriate dress” consisted of…hell, I can’t believe it enough to type it. Here’s the story.

Wow.

(On a more important note, Michael also recently posted some recommendations for Star Wars fan fiction. I stopped writing fanfic years ago, but it was always a blast, and it occurs to me that one of those stories is still unfinished. Maybe, if I’m ever sufficiently inebriated, I’ll post one here. What I did was take Lucas’s basic Star Wars plot and write my own trilogy of screenplays with that same story. Much fun was had, although there was some ridicule from certain quarters….)

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