I have never forgotten the date of my Wedding Anniversary. Been 34 years now.
Don’t ask, long story short
– my mother-in-law took me literally when I answered her question of WHEN?

I think I got the better deal. My poor wife ended up with a screwball.

Why the shocked look? I thought someone added water to a couple jars of Instant Martians I had on the Looney Tunes section of my web site. One day it’s all nice and quiet as usual and then the next visitors started to arrive like Instant Martians. Looney Tunes page views skyrocketed from 500 – 600 a day to 14,000 on Sat. Amateur, zoom zoom is nothing compared to escape velocity.

What would you think if you checked your stats and found a graph like this?

This is a graph of the Looney Tunes page views over the last 30 days. The norm is around 500. Seeing the first rise to 1,600 I thought ‘cool’. When it went over 7,000 the next day I thought ‘What?. The next day when it spiked over 15,000 I had to remove the brick from my pants.

Over a year the graph looks like it was drawn with a right angle square. Oh come on, at least pretend it was a shaky old geezer like me that did it.

Other stats were telling me that nearly all the traffic was coming from search engines and overwhelmingly from Google. That explained squat. I’ve had good rankings for a number of Looney Tunes character names. It wasn’t likely any change in my rankings would amount to that much traffic.

Too many questions and not enough knowledge to ask them. Why are so many people suddenly searching for Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote and Foghorn Leghorn? Whats causing so many people to go Looney all at once? What’s Up Doc? Want to sing along with me and Daffy? She was an acrobats daughter She swung by her teeth from a noose But one matinee her bridge gave way and she flew through the air like a goose

I didn’t know what to do. Run before it blew or start pointing fingers at suspicious wabbits.

On Sunday night we let an old Navy man into the house and shared coffee with him. In exchange he passed on information key to unlocking the mystery. I was seeing a diabolical plot to turn millions of socialable web citizens into cartoon characters unfold before me.

Facebook threw the water. What I was seeing was just a small ripple in the massive flood of people searching for a more realistic profile pic than the one they were using.

It was some awareness thing that caught me totally unaware. If I had known you were coming I would have spruced the place up a bit and baked a cake.

Yep, April 1st is my wedding anniversary. I picked the date but it was entirely unintended.

Long story short:

My wife and I lived together before getting married. For months my wife’s mother would call every Sunday. Each time she’s ask to speak to me and every time she had the same question. ‘When are you two going to get married?’ My usual response was a basic ‘Don’t know, no plans, someday’ until that one Sunday I joked ‘April 1st’.

I never got a chance to answer that question again. The very next week I learned wedding plans were already underway. It was then I realized my mother-in-law and I don’t share the same sense of humor. I want to believe she took me literally and proceeded as any mother would when given the date. The other option is my wife and her mother conspired to hold me to my ‘word’. But it’s too late to see the phone records in the week between those two Sundays. So let’s just say I never knew what hit me.

I got what every married man needs. An anniversary date he can’t forget. You know – if I had it to do it all over again I would. I still haven’t learned to keep my mouth shut when a wisecrack pops into my head.

The secret of my long marriage:
My wife tells me she married me for my potential.
So I never wasted any by accomplishing something.