1001 Posts and 36 Ewoks

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our 1001th (1001st?) post.

Whoa.

We've already done plenty of self-serving pat-on-the-back posts in the past, to celebrate the blog's birthday and how many hits we'd gotten, but I don't think we've ever kept track of the amount of content we've produced.

This is the part of the post where I'd astound you with a page count or word count, but I presumably have better things to do with my time than SIX MILLION FIFTY! That's the number of words we, uh, might have written. Those of you looking for an accurate number are out of luck, but I can offer some inaccurate numbers based on a cleverly lazy examination of the 1000 posts leading up to this one:

467 pages

832,816 words

36 Ewoks

Do bear in mind that these numbers are pulled from a massive Word document where I copy/pasted the entirety of the blog in HTML format (with all its
's and 's) and trimmed out everything from the header, footer, sidebar, and comments section. Also, I ran the numbers before yesterday's post was published, so the document I had technically comprised only 999 posts. At any rate, accuracy is not the primary focus here; self-congratulatory back-patting is.

Well done, us.

While I've got this massive document open, I think it's highly appropriate to look back through this blog's first 999 posts, which cover everything from orchids to Tally Hall to Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, and have some fun with statistics.

- When identifying one of this blog's writers by name, 68% of the time we're talking about Alex.

- Contrary to the popular belief that I talk about my favorite video game too much, the name "Mega Man" is only mentioned 942 times. References to three of Alex's favorite things--Batman, baseball, and the Beatles--come to a grand total of...886. I'm not obsessed.

- The colon is 28% more popular than the semicolon in our posts. Compare this to George Orwell's famously light-on-semicolons Coming Up for Air, which favors the colon by a whopping 82%.

- Pirates outnumber ninjas by about 3 to 1.

- We spelled "apocalypse" correctly exactly 18 times. At least four of these were accomplished without referring to the spell check.

- Elvis shows up twice on the blog. Three times, if you count that Elvis impersonator.

- Of the 39 direct references to Abe Lincoln, 12 of them are preceded by the word "Zombie."

- DC Comics is referenced 587 times, while Marvel Comics is referenced 775 times. That adds up to 1362, which is the year when Louis I of Hungary defeated and captured Ivan Sratsimir of Bulgaria, according to Wikipedia. I'm sure there's a significance in that somewhere.

- Lastly, and this probably goes without saying: There is only one William Shatner.

Whether you've been here for all 1001 posts or you're just the daughter of a vizier who stopped by to pick up some stories to tell your husband tonight, we're glad you've stuck with us. I sincerely hope that we'll be able to write another thousand posts, because I'd hate to lose the opportunity to call a post "2001: A Blog Odyssey" and get away with it.