The Immense Popularity of a Tonsured Bradley Phillis

I am under no illusions about the level of public interest that the Roediger House blog generates. It's a selfish indulgence that satisfies a pungent strain of OCD within me, it's an easy means for record-keeping and cataloguing, and it's also a way to share with interested friends and colleagues the comings and goings of RoHo life. Maybe it's safe to say the blog is also a habit.

Sometimes I glance at the stats, and a while back it struck me as remarkable that a brief post about friend and former Wake Forest grad student Bradley Phillis had earned over 500 hits and ranked 2nd of all-time. (Color me peeved, also, since I've cooked some amazing things and taken gorgeous photos of them...and they've not proved to be anywhere near as popular!)

Oh, but the power of Google! When I started digging into some explanation, here's what came up when I did a simple Google search for "tonsure":

Quite likely, it was the photo posted with that entry that got picked up by Google's search engine, and when I ran that image search at that time, I found that Bradley's picture was the fourth most popular image...which might reasonably explain why that blog post has been visited so many times:

The image's popularity deviates, as might be expected...I've searched other times and it's been the 5th most popular, or the 7th most popular...but more recently it has completely fallen out of the top returns. (The last time I checked, Bradley's tonsured mug was at the end of the 43rd row of images on the search results page.) I guess past notoriety and faded glory will have to achieve for us a small bit of satisfaction.