Poll Results: Show Up For The Pictures, Stay For The Jibber Jabber

The results are in on the latest Monkey survey, "What first brought you to the Mythical Monkey?" Not surprisingly, the majority of you said you first arrived here either while searching for a photo (22) or by way of a link from another blog (also 22). We here at the Monkey do tend to overstuff our posts with pictures. But what would you rather look at, Louise Brooks or a long gray block of impenetrable text? That's what I thought.

Among the other answers, five of you admitted to being a friend or family member, and six of you claimed brain damage—the latter of which strikes me as either way too many or not nearly enough. Three arrived here while searching for info or a movie-specific review, one got here by way of a review on the Internet Movie Database, and four chose "other."

The one vote for "an interest in alternate Oscars" was cast by yours truly. Although I think many readers find the whole "alternate Oscar" concept, first championed by Danny Peary in his book of the same name, confusing or frankly irritating, the truth is, I wouldn't have started this blog at all except for my own obsession with "who should have won," and what little forward momentum this blog has comes strictly from my own desire to get to the next award. So I think for the time being, I'll stick with the current format even if I do wind up tweaking it a bit.

Amazingly, no one picked "word of mouth." I would have thought sitting around in a bar talking about movie blogs would rank higher, especially when "Lets go back to my place and read the Monkey together" is a proven pick-up line. (Proven in the same sense that many things on the internet are proven, which is to say I made it up.)

Which reminds me of a true story from my law school days. At the end of one especially grueling semester, I held a film festival in my apartment—twenty-four consecutive hours of wholesome movie goodness, beginning at 11 in the morning and ending sometime after breakfast the following day. It turned into a bit of an event with something like fifty people showing up and camping out, including one woman I had never met who turned down a friend of mine for a date because she was "going to some guy's film festival."

There's a moral in there some place. I just don't know what it is.