When Michael Stops Sneezing, California Gets A Cold

One of the humbling things about doing politics on these here world-wide interwebs is that occasionally, in unexpected ways, you get reminded that your record-breaking traffic is somebody else's rounding error. Jon Fleischman's FlashReport.org is essential daily reading for countless mavens of California politics—and by "countless," I mean "many times fewer than the number of people shopping the long tail of dead-celebrity jpegs."

Last night around 7pm I started to get a flurry of emails from FlashReport readers—they couldn't get onto the website!  I tried it out myself and, sure enough, it was slow as molasses….

[The] site had ground to a virtual standstill because of a massive volume of traffic coming to the site.  I thought this to be a little odd, for a Thursday night…

It turns out that in a commentary I wrote for FR a couple of weeks ago I had a graphic image of the cover of Michael Jackson's 1984 "Thriller" album—and for some reason, when one did a Google images search for this, the image on my site came up number two!…

I never would have guessed that internet traffic following the sudden death of the pop superstar at the young age of 50 would have shut down the FlashReport!

P.S.  I am avoiding putting any graphics of Michael Jackson in this post on purpose

If he wants to get his numbers up, Fleischman had better buckle down and start writing about real celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sheila Kuehl.