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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