I didn’t say thank you loud enough last night after crossing the 100,000 visit mark. Frankly, as early as 10:38 pm may be for some of you that’s typically my fall asleep on the couch time. You don’t stay up to midnight much when you get up at 4:30.

Some bloggers need thanks that aren’t even actively blogging anymore: Chad Evans and The MaryHunter come to mind. Both were frequent commenters here and both helped me greatly in the early days of bRight & Early.

Ed Morrissey and Michelle Malkin also helped keep me going in the beginning. My first big traffic day came from a link at Michelle’s blog. If I had been a little smarter and had sitemeter on individual pages I would have reached 100,000 a couple of days earlier.

In the present the list gets even longer. To long to list in the short time I have left before work this morning. I’ll add to this later, but let me thank those who stuck around and left comments last night: USA Admiral, Steveegg, Stix, Wyatt, Snigs, RT, and any others who may have stopped by without commenting.

And thanks to whoever it was that stopped in from Sikeston, Mo.

Now, on with the show.

W00t!!

Thank you, whoever you are, and thank you Wyatt for the pimpage.

I’ll be back to normal tomorrow.

20:28 Twenty Five – The minimum age for a member of the House of Representatives. (Mark up one Cougar Bait search)

20:43 – Also the number of beers in a case. Philadelphia/SYLG – Wyatt?

20:46 Jacksonville, Fl/Google reader – Admiral?

20:56 – 22 – The atomic number of titanium – Illinois from yahoo mail.

21:26 – 21 – Blackjack – Searching for “audrey in season 7 24″

21:27 – 20 – The number of one of my all time favorite Phillies Mike Schmidt. South Berwick, Maine looking for Drill Here, Drill Now, Save Money.

21:27 – 19 – A Liv Tyler searcher

21:28 – 18 – Lexington, Ky. Drill Here

21:30 – 17 – Bel Air, Md. Another Drill Here looker.

21:34 – 16 – This reader was looking for info on generalissimo franco

21:44 – 15 – A visitor from Bayone looking for one of my favorites, Sandra Bullock

21:44 – 14 – Philadelphia again. The SYLG contingent.

21:45 – 13 – From First In!

21:46 – 12 – Massachusetts (John Kerry?) looking for Gabrielle Anwar

21:47 – 11 – ???

22:00 – 10 – NY/Liv Tyler

22:00 – 9 – California’s looking for Anwar. I knew it was going to be one of those ladies.

22:01 – 8 – Gabrielle’s popular in Minnesota, too.

22:01 – 7 – Ok. I didn’t expect to see anyone here looking for Matt Lauer.

22:03 – 6 – Charlotte, NC.

22:04 – 5 – NJ hearts Cougar Bait

22:18 – 4 – Brazil is looking for Elisha Cuthbert too

22:19 – 3 – An SYLG link from California. Thanks Wyatt!

22:26 – 2 – Just two more! I should have put more pictures of Jack Bauer’s offspring on this site long ago.

22:29 — 99,999!

So, who is going to be the One Hundred Thousandth visitior? One of the handful of great, regular visitors, or someone looking for a picture of:

Elisha Cuthbert

Cote de Pablo

Liv Tyler

or

Gabrielle Anwar

I’m hoping for the former, and betting on the later. Just 191 to go!

UPDATE: At 1:00 (EDT) there are just 120 left. The latest visitor, as expected, was looking for Ms. Anwar (my second most viewed post).

UPDATE II: The magic number is down to 43. Here for Snigs and the other ladies:

Jeffrey Donovan

Or, in the words of the original Maxwell Smart, “Missed it by that much.”

The last update on my trek to 100,000 visits was May 24th, my 3rd Blogiversary. At that time I needed 8151 visits to cross that threshold. At 7:10 this morning I need just 462!

So possibly today, more likely sometime tomorrow or early Wednesday morning, I’ll hit that milestone. So let me know if you are that visitor. Sitemeter is at the bottom of the left sidebar. There may be a prize, although I have no idea what.

More importantly, thanks to every single one of you that have visited, commented, and made this blogging thing so much fun.

A very brief review before I start year four.

bRight & Early started at blogspot (http://brightandearly.blogspot.com/) three years ago today. Sixteen posts later I moved to a sub domain of a domain I no longer own. I’ve been through several versions of WordPress, currently using 2.5.1 At the end of February 2006 I moved everything over here, and here I plan to stay.

This is post #3206. That works out to just under three posts per day. Way too few.
There are 95 categories and 1183 tags and nearly 6500 comments.

I am 8151 visitors away from 100,000. At the current rate (which has improved greatly over the past few months) I should get there in less than two months.

Year Four, here I come.

I’m going to go out on a realistic limb here and concede that I probably won’t get 8266 visits between now and 4:40am tomorrow morning. That’s ok. Reaching 100,000 visits is still very close and more importantly, three years after starting bRight & Early I am still having fun.

Ironically, John McCain was involved in my first post and is sure to play a role in many of the posts over the next few months. The topic was the gang of 14. Here is part of what I wrote then:

Still, my biggest issue with this compromise is that the right did all the compromising. Why stop there? Should we even up sides? “We’ll give you four Senators now and moderate to be named later if you’ll just be nice to us and say nice things about us in the press.”

Since that time we have more than evened up sides, and the “balance” is likely to become more unbalanced in November. None the less I plan on being here, “Up before dawn to bring you thoughts from the right”, for the foreseeable future.

One week to go and 9000 visits left to get. Have you linked yet?

That’s how many visitors I need in the next two weeks to get to 100000 by my Blogiversary. That’s only 793.6/day. Um, yeah.

My college choir director had this bit of advice for when you are given a compliment, “Say thank you, and shut up.” The idea was to appreciate the kind words and not to go off on some tangent about how you really messed up the third number or something like that.

The same suggestion applies to gifts. When you get a gift, the best thing to do is just say “thank you” and put a sock in it. I’m going to ignore that advice and do a bit of speculation about a gift I received last night.

Wyatt sent me a link to this story. The focus of the article is not the words written for the Daily Mail, or even the subject matter. The story is:

Not the story of Elisha Cuthbert and her new boyfriend Calgary Flames hockey player Dion Phaneuf, but a chance to display pics of Jack’s “little girl.”

So, did Wyatt pass this gem on to me because of our shared appreciation for all things Bauer? Or does he know that Elisha Cuthbert is one of the top search words that brings traffic to this blog (not to mention the few hits I’ve got from “Cougar Bait”)? Perhaps he is trying to help push bRight & Early over 100,000 visitors (11,814 to go).

Or maybe it would be better if I took my directors advice and just let the pictures do the talking. Thank you. I’ll shut up now.

I know posting has been pretty slack around here the past few days or so. I’m just not sure why. I’m online the same amount of time, reading and searching the same amount, and the things I usually write about are still happening. I didn’t even comment on the Flyers 3-2 win last night to put them up three games to one in their series. And it’s not like there hasn’t been stuff to write about it. Could there be too much?

This is not good behavior for someone who is shooting for 100,000 visits. [Update on that: currently at 87,249 leaving 12,751. I need to get about 550 visits a day, or about 3-4 times what I get on average, to reach the goal by my blogiversary.]

I also haven’t been pushing the Forum enough. I’m the only one registered, so I’m talking to myself. (Not all that unusual, but it takes a new dimension in odd when you do it online.)

I guess I need to take Cher’s advice from Moonstruck — “Snap out of it!”

Reduced to taking advice from Cher. This is not good. Not good at all.

Throwing some site related items into one post:

• Don’t forget to enter your caption in this weeks Caption Contest.
• Discuss (pretty much) anything in the bRight & Early Forum. Or just register and say hello.
• I still am shooting to reach 100,000 visits by my Blogiversary on May 24th. Right now I need 13,931 visits. That’s about 450 visits a day, or 19 per hour! Link and Visit. Visit and Link. Please!