Strangers Among Us

We check our site twice a day, sometimes thrice. And we always take a look at the site meter to see what kind of traffic we're getting. We usually average between 20 and 50 visitors an hour. Imagine our surprise when we saw the hit counter spiking at over 300 hits during the 2PM period and trailing off over the next couple of hours after 1,000 visitors hit us in 6 hours. A little backtracking shows what happened.

Someone told a site called "The Raw Story" about our 10 October post entitled "They Grow up so Fast." The subject was the two-year-old child who shot the four-year-old in North Lawndale. In an example of creative headline writing, their story was entitled "Chicago 'Cop' slurs 4 year old latino on blog." Evidently, they failed to read (A) our bio which clearly states we are a Cop, not a 'Cop' (B) the tagline of our blog (sarcasm and silliness from a windy city cop) (C) the follow up post two days later whereby we recount that the latin king uncle was storing multiple guns at the home and (D) the tenor of the post where we were actually making fun of the lack of weapon discipline prevalent in the gang banger culture whereby a two-year-old child can get a hold of a loaded weapon and harm another child.

So on one hand, we are amused and not a little proud that we have topped 1,400 visitors (and still climbing) today. We are also amused that someone thought it necessary to misrepresent the intent of our postings and inadvertently directed 1,000 people who never would even have known of this blog to give us a look (thanks for that whoever you are). We are also going to take pains to note that this is and continues to be A PUBLIC BOARD, open to anyone with a computer. We are most heartened that the 1,000 people who visited the board must be more intelligent than "The Raw Story" gives them credit for as we have yet to see a disparaging comment about our readers, our job, our blog and our crabby pants comments.

UPDATE: 1,500 hits as of 2040 hours - getting hits from all over the country, Europe, Asia and Australia. Hi Everyone!!

UPDATE: 1,600 as of 2200 hours and still climbing. Yowza.