Wednesday, March 5, 2025

ONE MILLION HITS!

by G. Jack Urso
 
Screen shot from the statistics page of Aeolus 13 Umbra.

On March 2, 2025, Aeolus 13 Umbra achieved a major milestone by surpassing one million page hits! For a 14-year-old blog by a virtual nobody that receives no advertising and does no promotion that’s not too bad, but notably 500,000 of these hits came in the last two years with 396k in the past 12 months alone!

The name, Aeolus 13 Umbra, dates back to the mid-1990s when I toyed around with an idea for a local monthly literary paper which proved to be too complicated and expensive to get off the ground. I needed a name that was evocative of the arts and settled on Aeolus 13 Umbra.

For Sci-Fi fans, if that name sounds familiar, it echoes Lost in Space’s Dr. Zachery Smith’s secret code name “Aeolus 14 Umbra” from the pilot episode. As a former Latin student, I knew “Aeolus” was a reference to a minor Greek god who controlled the winds. Umbra, of course, was a reference to shadows — specifically the darkest part of a shadow. The number 13 often represents bad luck. Together, the three elements can be very loosely interpreted as “The Dark Shadow of an Unfavorable Wind.”

In 2010, I ran into an old college classmate online, Paul Goat Allen. A published author himself, Paul remembered my pretensions as a writer as asked if I was still writing and had a blog. Well, I was doing very little of the former and none of the latter. As a college composition instructor, I was a little embarrassed. If I was teaching composition I should be actively engaged in composition beyond my work-related obligations.

While considering what I wanted my blog to be about, I ran into Wes Clark’s Avocado Memories, one man’s account of growing up in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s. An exhaustively researched social diary, for anyone growing up in the era, Wes might as well be writing about your family or one you knew. It is a personal reflection, but one anchored with a profile of mid-20th century social history.

My master’s degree is in Liberal Studies with a focus in literature and history and I thought I could use that as a source for ideas, but I wanted to focus on little-known topics or on little-known aspects of more well-known topics. I thought back to the name I came up with for my abandoned literary paper, Aeolus 13 Umbra, and the idea all came together at that point.

I have a number of articles that have contributed to that one million hits, two projects have been pushing those numbers. The first is The Hot Hero Sandwich Project, a documentary effort I created in 2023 to profile the 1979 NBC children’s show “Hot Hero Sandwich.” A “Saturday Night Live” approach to children’s educational entertainment, to date, the project has yielded nearly 100 articles and 24 interviews with actors, writers, producers, and the totally awesome classic rock house band. The project moved to its own website last year at www.HotHeroSandwich.com, but the articles posted on Aeolus still bring in a lot of readers.

The other articles contributing to pushing me over one million hits chronicle a story that began in 1989. In June of that year, as I was working the overnight at a radio station when the Tiananmen Square massacre happened, I began using the station's massive satellite dish to bring in signals from any station broadcasting about the event when I picked up a recording of an English-language announcer for Radio Beijing confirming that the massacre took place. It is the only official Chinese government report confirming the event took place. These two articles include:


These articles have been posted for years now, so why the suddenly increase in attention? A couple months ago, China released its DeepSeek AI. The big news about it was if you ask DeepSeek about the Tiananmen Square massacre it will report that it can find no information about it. Almost immediately, those articles above began getting tens of thousands of hits on weekly basis, and guess what? About half of them come from China itself. Very interesting . . .

Some of the most-read articles also contributing to reaching one million hits:

As you can see, it is a mix of literature, history, music, and Sci-Fi.

Inspired by Wes Clark’s Avocado Memories, I began my own tales of the mid-20th century, The Norwood Avenue Chronicles, which chronicles my youth and some of the extraordinary people and events in my life. To date, this encompasses 22 articles. The Prison Chronicles, reviewing my career in inmate education, also has helped push this blog above one million hits.

Aeolus 13 Umbra reflects my MA degree in liberal studies with a focus in history and literature, as well as my background as an arts editor, defense analyst, and as a reporter. It focuses on bringing light to obscure topics. Check it out, like one million others already have!

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