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Last Words |
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The tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, II.1.5-6
Way back in 1997, I first posted the beginnings of this Last Words collection to the Internet on a free GeoCities website. It languished there for about two years, collecting a total of around 2,500 hits. Then in early 2000, some web-journalist stumbled upon it and published a short, but very positive, review about it in a local newspaper. That review was, in turn, picked up by AP or some other such agency and posted in papers throughout the country. Overnight, traffic to the site increased by well over a factor of thirty. Shortly thereafter, someone at Yahoo decided to feature it as a "Cool Link," and the counter at the bottom of my homepage really started spinning. I only set up that counter with six digits, never expecting that I'd even have 100,000 visitors. Boy, was I wrong; I stopped keeping track after it made over two complete revolutions. For the past several years, while remaining steady, the visits to my GeoCities pages have slowed considerably. So, I've decided to shutdown that site and incorporate my Last Words pages into this one. At the same time, I've updated many quotations, revised some background information, and added a substantial number of entries. One thing that has amazed me about this last words collection is the number of people who have copied my entries lock, stock, and barrel and reposted them on quotations sites across the Internet. One bozo (some guy with comcast account identified as ~machucheck) even copied every one of my pages to include my formats, gifs, and links and posted them--with only partial success--as his own. Anyway, I still am fascinated by last words and hope that if you take time to browse through this collection, you will enjoy them too; just not as much as ~machucheck. |
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