Something rather extraordinary happened around here yesterday.  The state of the Met produced a completely unprecedented amount of traffic.  This year traffic has been running around 6000-8000 hits/month.  It’s been steadily growing since I started in August 2011 but not wildly.  Yesterday saw 5916 hits; most of them on the Met piece.  It was 17 months before I got that many hits in a month.  In less than 24 hours the piece became the most read thing I have posted eclipsing the previous “best seller” which was, oddly enough, a review of the 1992 ROH Salome with Maria Ewing.  This has been steadily garnering traffic for two and a half years mostly, it appears, from people who Google variants of “maria ewing nude”.  It appears that even a naked Lady Hall can’t compete with labour relations at the Met.