Mark Twain Doesn't Live Here

Well now it's curious so many folks have come to this humble blog in search of information about the saying, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble..."

The website statistics tell me that just yesterday Google sent ten people here (darned near a single-day record), who had typed one variation of that saying or another into the search field. (Yahoo sent a total of none, which may indicate why that company is on the skids.)

I typed the first part of the phrase into Google myself, just now, and this blog came up third on the results page. Kind of gratifying, I guess. Another blogger over at the Humanities Division at Northwest College has put a link to my "It ain't..." post on their website, and that seems to have brought some folks here, too. (To return the favor: it's here.)

I don't know what it is that fascinates so many people about a thing that Mark Twain may have -- or may not have -- said. But people in California, Illinois, British Columbia, our Nation's Capitol, England, Texas and even Vietnam demonstrated on the same day this week some curiosity about my favorite aphorism.

I've written in this space about John McCain and why the McCainines lost the election. Real important and insightful stuff, I thought. But nobody seems curious about that.

I've posted some stories that I've passed off as humor, and few people seem to give a hoot.

Somebody checked in from Durham, North Carolina, didn't see what they were looking for, and bounced away in under a second, while a devoted fan in San Francisco visited three times yesterday, looked at three pages each time, and spent all of eight minutes here -- probably looking for the exit.

One individual dropped by to find out something about Arthur C. Clarke, who I happened to mention in one post, and stuck around for 17 minutes to peruse 6 pages. This is an example of how the Internet can get you off track. Whoever that was got distracted by other things and totally forgot why he or she came into the room. I sometimes do that myself, so I understand the feeling.

If there were some way to make a buck off people's curiosity about "It ain't what you know..." I would sure like to know what it is. More than that, though, I'd like to find out why people in so many places in the world are so darned interested in it. Must be important enough to them that they spend their valuable time on Google tracking down the phrase.

Google Analytics doesn't let me know who you are, but it shows me a little bit about how visitors got here and where they hail from and even what browser they use. I wish it would give me some insight into what the heck they're doing here, what they were thinking.

So, do this for me if you'd be so kind: Leave a comment and let me know why you dropped by. What were you looking for that you did or didn't find? I won't be offended if you got here by mistake; most of my visitors probably did.