Thursday, March 16, 2006

The 3,000-Hit Club

Getting 3,000 hits is a major milestone in the career of any baseball player. My own favorite all-time 3,000-Hit Club member from my childhood is the late Roberto Clemente. In 1972, in his last at-bat of the season - also to be the last at-bat of his career - the great Pittsburgh Pirates right-fielder smacked a double off of New York Mets pitcher, Jon Matlack. Clemente, an understated humanitarian, was to perish in an overloaded airplane that crashed 31 Dec 1972 on its way to Nicaragua carrying supplies to aid survivors in the wake of a Christmas holiday earthquake.


Clemente is shown here with fellow Hall-of-Famers and immediate predecessors in The 3,000-Hit Club, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.

"Anytime you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't, then you are wasting your time on this Earth" - Roberto Walker Clemente


For most of us, blogging is not quite such a noble act, although many of us get into it to make things better. However, a great many bloggers would sob and cry if they only got 3,000 hits in a single day.

Well, I am bursting with pride at getting my 3,000th hit today - my "lifetime" accumulation since starting the blog on 15 December 2005. As my luck would have it, I can't thank anyone for this particular hit since it came across SiteMeter this evening as from an unknown location, but at least left their mark as coming over from Skeptico's referral to my recent post on Isaac Hayes quitting South Park.

What's kind of cool for me is that the blog has reached this milestone without announcing it to any of my family or co-workers. Oh, of course, the highlight for me so far has been the tremendous accidental traffic from British crossword enthusiasts. As a result, I am proudly one of few Americans whose Google share from the UK search engine outranks that from Google.com.

I've also gotten a fair bit of traffic from clay crafters trying to work with terra sigillata, recreational drug enthusiasts looking for information on hallucinating with traditional plants like Hoasca/Ayahuasca, and people researching Dr Akira Endo, the Japanese natural product scientist who discovered the first cholesterol-lowering statin.

I've actually been so burned out on science from work lately that my pharmaceutical/herbal posts have been pretty infrequent. As I regain balance in my life, I intend to change that because there are some great new natural products stories out there.

Most of my support has come from fellow bloggers and you folks who check in regularly to see if I'm going to say anything of benefit. My biggest referrals have come from friends around the world who have hosted my posts in Grand Rounds or The Skeptics' Circle. This is a remarkable community in which I've made a great many e-friends in medicine, nursing, and all aspects of academia from undergrads to full professors.

Okay, so this is almost as bad as an Oscar's acceptance speech (cue music now).

So, many thanks to Barbados Butterfly, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, Paige's Page, and Unused and Probably Unusable for hosting my carnival posts. Of course, I would be remiss if not for Orac, who made the suggestion that I submit as early and as often as possible to blog carnivals. Finally, special thanks to blogger-in-absentia, BotanicalGirl, and all of the graduate students and postdocs who I always hold in the highest regard for studying what they love no matter how cynical we older farts get about this crazy business.

4 Comments:

At Sat Mar 18, 01:07:00 PM EST, Blogger define_me said...

Your speech definitely outranks any Oscar speech I've ever heard.

Congratulations on the 3000 hits!

*hands you a pint of Guinness*

Cheers!

 
At Sat Mar 18, 10:12:00 PM EST, Blogger Abel Pharmboy said...

Hey, thanks! However, someone from your neck of the woods would do best to offer me a glass of Inniskillin Eiswein or equivalent.

BTW, PharmPreSchooler was sitting on my lap yesterday as I made my blog rounds and asked, "why is that brain blue?"

 
At Wed Mar 22, 01:26:00 AM EST, Blogger define_me said...

Awww...that's so adorable! It seems like PharmPreSchooler might be a future neuroscientist. Maybe the next Eric Kandel???

I am a wine neophyte so unfortunately I have not tried Inniskillin Eiswein. I'll be trying it out now that you've brought it up though.

 
At Wed Mar 22, 01:44:00 AM EST, Blogger Abel Pharmboy said...

She's quite amazing - I am amazed what a sponge she is and how observant and sensitive she is to all around her. We just want to support her in that anything she wants to do is possible. Took a tour to a local firehouse with our parent-child care co-op and she's totally stoked because the fire chief was a woman.

I'm not a wine snob at all, just an enthusiast - you just live in a great place for some of the most remarkable and distinctive wines in North America. I took two "leisure classes" as a grad student from a local wine merchant who taught us to trust our taste rather than marketing. I don't know exactly where you are, but take a friend, preferably a person who interests you romantically, down to Iniskillin for a weekend and experience what they have there.

 

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