Traffic bulletin

Every few days I check the blog's stats for the fun of it: not that I get too many hits. However, the last time I checked I was surprised to see a nice little boost thanks to the people from Mental Floss. They did a post on interesting vaudeville acts, and decided to use my post on Gus Visser as one of the links.

I'm not quite sure why, but Gus Visser seems to be one of the more enduringly popular pages here, in that when I check the stats, it's often in the top five pages viewed. Other pages come and go, with the top five usually being rounded out by a current page, and pages for somebody's birthday, which I would bet is the result of somebody doing an image search and being directed to the image I used in conjunction with that person's birthday. While the Mental Floss post is the single biggest URL providing hits to my blog right now, when it comes to entire domains, Google leads by a good ways.

As for vaudeville and the movies, there's a long tradition in Hollywood referencing vaudeville: some of the comedy bits in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 are taken directly from vaudeville, while characters in movies who worked their way through the vaudeville circuit on their way to becoming big is a not uncommon theme. Singin' In the Rain and The Hard Way come to mind, while there are also biopics like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Gypsy. And even earlier forms of entertainment for the masses that predated vaudeville made it to the movies, as those who watched the Peepshow Pioneers episode of Moguls and Movie Stars would recognize. A good example of this is the dancer Carmencita, now on Youtube thanks to the Library of Congress. The LOC has several other of Edison's very early movies up on Youtube now.