Amid the tedium of unpacking from our trip to Ecuador and the almost countless other occupations I should have been taking up, I’ve practiced some avoidance by futzing around here at the blog. What, I wondered, have been the most frequently read posts in my just over three years of blogging? The results prompted an idea. The spring semester began yesterday, and your opinionated host will be quite busy this first week. What say, I thought to meself, you give your loyal readers some prominent posts with which to soothe the aching heart, just in case they should miss you awfully much? (Let my affection be not unrequited, please.)

Find, then, below, as a kind of belated celebration, after three months, of my third anniversary of blogging – which went unheralded back in November – those 15 most read posts during the red earth’s reign of sadness. These are followed, in arbitrary assertion of my right as host, by several other posts I have thought to favor and that did not betide to make it into the top ranks in readership. Nothing personal, I’m sure.

Read, read often – or so I’m paid to say – and thanks, of course.

Drum roll, please…

1.  “About”

Am I that fascinating? Well – you clicked on it. I would not have – how should I say it – the Trumposity to call attention to this page’s (to my utter, humble surprise) number one position were it not for the excerpt it offers from Julia’s India Journal – with sublime color photo – and the close to my 2006 article on the 80^th anniversary of Route 66. Take it away, Buzz.

2.  “Democrats Are Punks”

It’s the title, for sure, which no doubt, drew a ton of unsuspecting Tea Bagging conservatives.

3.  “Blink 1 – In My Bedroom”

From the days when I still offered some new creative work on the blog, the first part of an extended meditation on death, still in progress, and a first draft, as are all my efforts here.

4.  “Big Government II: What Preserves Us”

It ain’t over. It will never be over. Suck on it.

5.  “Blink II – In Far Rockaway”

I’m from it. Not dead yet.

6.  “Owning Culture: Indigenous Rights and the Elgin Marbles”

You don’t own me…

7.  “The Honor of the Mascot, or A Team by Any Other Name”

Tomahawk chop this.

8.  “Mind Games I”

Keep playing them. Plato did.

9.  “Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald, and the War of Ideas”

The most recent entry onto the list. Guess.

10. “In a Navajo Way”

Travels in Indian Country.

11. “Historical Identity and Cultural Responsibility”

It’s one nation, through time – we inherit its sins along with its riches.

12. “The Malice of Mondoweiss”

It didn’t take long to see through this couch case of an anti-Semite. “Mama!”

13. “A Death in Summer”

A memoir of my friendship with Antony Alda.

14. “Eight Bad Arguments for Torture”

And they’re bad.

15. “Obama in Oslo: Power without Empire”

What neither conservatives nor Puritopians can see in him.

And then some personal favorites that occurred to me.

• “The Dark Backward”

Australopithecus sediba calls us to the things of this world.

• “The God Particle”

Maybe the original 1% – and whey we exist.

• “James Madison and Madison, Wisconsin”

Fear plutocracy.

• “Who”

My past, a friend from it, and a question about myself.

• “Mac”

On what would have been my father’s hundredth birthday.

• “Penelope”

Run for your life.

And finally –

• “A Pause in the Journey”

At the close of a year of it, I meditate on the nature of travel.