When my kids were young, up early at five o’clock, wired and awake, and me trying to catch up with bolshy big cups of stove-top espresso, we read. We read The Cat in the Hat, and Thomas the Train, and Pajama Time, and Harold and the Purple Crayon, and a hundred other books over and over again. One morning, after countless shots of espresso, I suddenly realized Harold and the Purple Crayon is a retelling of the biblical creation story. I took to the internet to read what others had to say about that.

To my astonishment, I couldn’t find any similar theories. C’mon, I thought, with his crayon Harold creates the heavens and earth, the animals and humans, on the last page he hops into bed (that he created) and goes to sleep. And on the seventh day he rests. Could it be more obvious than that? How could I be the only one to see this?

Today, I searched again. First with Bing and then, later with Google. I did a half-assed job of it. I could easily have missed something. I wanted to write, not poke around the internet, and maybe I didn’t want to find my theory anywhere else. It’s nice to have something all my own.

This is on my mind today because my months-old blogpost The Mob is having a mini viral event. Over the past few days, two hundred-eighty people have visited the page, all through Google search. The post is about the similarities between Walter Chandoha’s famous cat photo titled The Mob and an iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s movie A Clockwork Orange. I believe this similarity is intentional, and I think I make a strong case for support. This is one of my favorite posts because like my Harold and the Purple Crayon revelation, I seem to be the only person who has made this connection.

Even before the past few days, people dropped in on this post regularly. Plenty of keywords to search on. The Chandoha photo is adored by cat lovers everywhere. A Clockwork Orange is a highly regarded film and is also popular with teenage boys looking for a major dose of sex and violence. The blogpost is also about artificial intelligence and Michael Jackson. It’s got something for everyone. But most important to me, it floats my Kubrick/Chandoha theory, and it does so in the first two paragraphs. Even if people accidently surf into my post and quickly leave, they’re still likely to get my point.

While I love this post getting so much attention, I have no idea why. I tried to figure out if Chandoha or A Clockwork Orange are in the news right now, and I can’t find anything. A few years ago, a post I wrote about the video game Fortnite exploded. In this case, people weren’t finding it with a search engine they just appeared. And of the hundreds of people who visited that post over a week or so, almost every one of them also visited my “About” page. After reading the post, a friend of mine suggested that it might have been assigned reading for a high school or college class as a ‘do this’ or a ‘don’t do that’ example.

Regardless, the extra visitors I’m getting this week is appreciated. People seem to be taking some time to look around after they find my blog. Dozens of posts are getting read (or at least viewed). While this hasn’t generated many followers, it’s gratifying to know that someone is interested.