I’m not one that pays much attention to my hit count, at least not in any precise way, though I do keep half an eye on day-to-day trends. After all, I don’t have a Natalija, and despite Kathy Kinsley’s entreaties, I don’t think she really wants to see the likes of me. Hits, files, and visits all seem too nebulous to take them seriously as precision indicators of anything. Many people stumble in here by accident from a weird google search, and no doubt back slowly out of the site with hands held tremulously over eyes. Others are probably robots.

Some, however, seem to almost obsess over it, and apparently there’s some deep itch in the human psyche that requires the recording of particularly ticks of the web site (and other types) of odometer.

I once had a friend (well, actually, I have him still, but I won’t name him to protect the guilty) who had a car about to turn over a hundred thousand miles (this was back in the days when this was a significant automotive feat, particularly for American cars). He started carrying a camera around with him so that he could catch the odometer in the act as it slowly whirled all the goose eggs. One morning, as he drove into the parking lot at work, it was almost there, so he actually continued to cruise around the parking lot for several minutes, so that he could be sure to capture the moment for posterity and his progeny, lest he forget it later in the frenetic haste to get home after a busy day at work.

Now forget about the historical contingency of the situation, the fact that if we had evolved with eight digits instead of ten, that he would have been breathlessly awaiting his 32,768th mile (though in base 8, it still would have read 100,000, and happened three times as often, and been much less of a mark of mechanical longevity). There was a man dedicated to numbers.

Over at Libertarian Samizdata, as I type these words, they are moving up on (they suppose, in whatever way these things are counted), their 100,000th visitor (current count–99,6…well, I can’t say what the current count is, because SURPRISE, SURPRISE, blogspot is down again–guess they’ll have to wait a while longer). Anyway, in their odometorial excitement and upcoming ecstacy, they’ve asked their readers to keep an extra sharp eye out, and for whoever is number ten to the fifth, to please take a screenshot and send it to them.

Well, folks, hate to break it to you, but I don’t know how you’d authenticate it. I could go to LS from now until doomsday (or whenever they change their template, whichever comes first), view source, edit the counter forward or back to 100K, view page and snap. I can be the tenth of a million visitor any time I want.

So my question is, how will they know to whom to award the mythical prize? And does it really matter?

[Update at 2:24 PM PST]

I just went back and checked, and I was 100,005…

Missed it by that [holding up index finger and thumb very close together] much.