Crikey

Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed in what would normally be a freakish accident. Considering the personality involved, "death by stingray" isn't so surprising as sad as it is. He was only 44 years old. What makes it freakish to me is the popularity it has brought to this blog.

This Site has had 3,766 visits so far today and it is 9:40 AM. The site got twenty new visitors just between 9:37:21 am and 9:39:07 am. The surge in readership is due to a Google Image Search glitch. I link to a Steve Irwin image in a distant post. The image itself doesn't even appear on the blog and I was referring to a character at a bar who looked like Steve Irwin so the post isn't even about him. However a Google Image Search for Steve Irwin links directly to this site for image number 5, a rather appealing shot of the deceased.

This glitch has been going on for a while however not so many people have been looking for a Steve Irwin image up until now. It didn't take long to figure that he was up to some sort of mischief. So I went to the New York Times site and sure enough...

It's only September 4th and this month's bandwidth for disclexington.com is almost maxed out. That's because my blogger profile image is stored on disclexington.com and that image appears on every page of this site. Also another disclexington.com image appears on the page Google accidentally takes image searchers to (oddly enough that image is a show poster for an Australian Rockabilly band, the Red Hot Poker Dots*). I removed these images so as to reduce costs.

Maybe I can recoup the loss in Adsense revenue, hmmmm.

*It's occurred to me that some logic in the google search engine combines the text referring to the Australian band with the show poster image and the Steve Irwin reference causing this problem.