100,000

There’s a slight chance that Angry Bear will get its 100,000th visitor sometime today; more likely, the meter will turnover sometime this weekend. 100,000 is not too bad for a bit under a year. If you’re excited by Angry Bear history, my first post was on 2/14/03 (my girlfriend was out of town then; when I saw her on the 16th, I asked her to guess what I had done on Valentine’s day. Somehow, even after many tries, she was unable to guess the obvious: “started a blog!”)

My first big link came from Dave Niewert, helping to propel my daily readership into the double digits (thanks, Dave!).

Kash joined the blog on 8/19/2003 with a prescient post about the need for the administration to alter its plan and commit more resources to Iraq. Originally, Kash was only going to fill in while I was on vacation, but I was so impressed with his posts (as were our readers) that I wisely invited him to stay.

After Kash’s joined the blog, the rate of traffic growth increased nicely (not just correlation, I presume). It didn’t quite grow as fast as actual and projected deficits under Bush, but the pace was nice nonetheless. We’re now over 500 per day on the weekdays, which is far more than I ever expected. So thanks to all who linked Angry Bear, and most of all, thanks to the readers!

AB

P.S. Another story I’ve been meaning to tell. In early January, at the annual meetings of the American Economics Association, Kash and I finally met, at The Bitter End in San Diego. A good time was had by all, and several many beers were consumed. Eventually my girlfriend joined us. Her reaction was “wow, he seems really nice, and normal.” If you know many economists, you’ll agree that that’s no small feat.

One last story: whence the title Angry Bear? Most would guess that it’s based on anger at the Bush administration combined with some skepticism about the prospects of the stock market. Both are good guesses and contributed somewhat to the naming of the blog. But the principle impetus was the expression, which I’ve rarely heard outside of Texas, “It’s like shooting a bear with a .22, you’ll only make him angry!”

We now return to our regularly scheduled economic and political analysis.