Now this is getting weird. Yesterday I had 1233 visits to this site - a month ago I was averaging 450. In the last few weeks, RSS visits have gone from about 30% of the traffic to 75%. I suspect there is some sort of automated RSS visiting happening rather than a wave of new readers fascinated with my observations on dentils and mobius strips. The Flea noted the same bump happening at the time of the murder of Nick Berg and suggested:

The bots might be restless! But my thinking is a flood of people went looking for news and commentary from blogs by preference to the broadcast and print stuff. People are angry and nothing on television reflected that anger or offered concrete ways to address it.

So are you angry or are you bots?  

There is also the Google effect that the more topics you reference, the more things search engines will aim people to your site about.   Right now - for utterly unknown reasons other than they are words on my front page - I rate top ten for "kerry's policies" and "election pool" and, of course, "A.A. Gill".   In May, 122 people came here looking for just Mr. Gill.   

There is an article in this week's New Yorker (May 31st issue, page 31) on the frailties and misdirections from which Lord Goog suffers, focusing on the factor of most frequent visits which Google relies upon for ranking.   But it appears that if a phrase appears on a page visited it appears to Google to be a visit for that phrase, which manifests in increased ranking of the page visited for that phrase and more likelihood that people will click through a Google ranking for that page.    A vicious circle of obfuscation due to an wonky algorithm.   [Haven't we all seen that before!].  

So whether you are bots, angry or dislocated googlonians, welcome.