Here comes the bride!
The nice thing about a blog is that it is the gift that keeps on giving. And when you write a post that references nud!ty or p*rn in any way, you can pretty much guarantee that Google will ensure that your post continues giving thrills to pervs and hard-up frat boys for years to come.

I had been wondering why my site traffic had gone berserk the last two days. I thought I had finally broken out of my China/PR/rant niche and touched the mass audience. Fame, riches and a deal for "Imagethief: the motion picture" (to be produced by Joel Silver and directed by the Wachowski brothers) loomed. I put a down payment on a Porsche Cayenne (all the rage for the princelings in Beijing these days).

Prematurely it turns out. It's still the same 500-odd entertainment-starved regulars coming to this site every day. The recent excitement is, I am sad to say, nothing more than a prurience-powered anomaly. A skin-fueled statistical blip. I don't really mind the traffic*, but I'm not trying to build Imagethief's reputation on cheap page-views (hence the smattering of search-confounding punctuation in this post).

Last November, I wrote a post on a China Daily article that reported a surge in the popularity of n*de wedd!ng photos in China's frigid Northeast. After the usual spate of views, it slipped quietly into obscurity in the Imagethief content "long-tail", which, of course, I still hope to someday mine for untold lucre. However, there is no idea that can't be recycled by bloggers, pop-culture and the mainstream media, especially if naked Asian w*men are involved. Having presumably missed last November's nuptial thrill boat, AFP yesterday ran a story following what appears to be a new Chinese news report on the spread of n*de wedding photos to Anhui (yes, Anhui - sexual hotbed that it is). AFP's story was picked up in various places, and the Telegraph spotted it also (that's their photo above - thanks, Richard).

There is no disease, no pox, no plague that spreads faster than the idea of a free t!t-shot spreads through the Internet. It took about six minutes before everyone within sight of a testosterone molecule and a computer was Googling for "n*de+wedd!ng+photos+ China", hoping, one must presume, for a free look.

I suppose I should be flattered that the search string above returns Imagethief as the number-four result. I should abandon all my writerly pretensions and go straight for the smut. It's clearly where the audience and, therefore, the money is. And girls almost never offer to take their clothes off for spin doctors - god knows, it can be a hard enough sell on Mrs. Imagethief. In fact, several years ago, a friend of mine suggested this very thing to me (ironically, while I was living in smut-deprived Singapore). "Will," he said, "we should start a girly website. I know a guy who's making ten-grand a week doing that."

While the idea of ten grand week was enticing, I was deterred by the thought of explaining the resulting success to my parents: "Mom! Dad! I finally made it! I'm a pornographer!"

But, you know, it could still happen.

*The Dongbei n*de wedd!ng photo post is now the second most-viewed on Imagethief, after a post about hyper-endowed Japanese pubo-nymphette S@yaa Ir!e. Ms. Ir!e still leads by a factor of five. Go figure.