Check out this Salmon Thirty Salmon on my favorite airline.

...deep in the heart of Denton, Texas, where I was privileged to give a talk to the School of Library and Information Science at Texas Women's University. It was a great crowd - heck, they're all great crowds - and I had a fun time meeting the students and faculty. For a change I took my wife and kids along, which turned the usual frantic and emotionally draining speaking trip into a relaxed vacation. We stayed with family, took turns flying in Uncle Fred's bird dog (some time of airplane, I'm reliably informed), visited Cousin Hayden's fire station, and just generally kicked back and soaked up the heat.

Tomorrow I'm off to Columbus, OH to speak at the Ohio Library Council annual conference banquet. The conference store will be selling our first two books, and I'm bringing along copies of the third to sell after the talk. I will of course sign anything that's put in front of me. Please stop by and say Hi - I don't get to Ohio very often!

Last week was a busy one. We greeted over 80,000 visitors from Penny Arcade and yesterday a few thousand Serenity fans dropped by. Over the course of a week we served up almost seven million archived strips. By yesterday demand for our RSS feed (increasingly our main distribution channel) had almost doubled. I would hazard a guess that in one fell swoop our audience has widened considerably from its loyal base of library workers.

That doesn't mean we're going to change anything. This week's sequence doesn't have much (okay, anything) to do with libraries, as sometimes happens, but next week we'll be back to normal. At which point I expect we'll lose some of our new fans. Because it's not usually gaming or movie humor. Often, because both Gene and I are pop culture geeks, but not most of the time. As you'll know if you're one of the folks who plowed through our archive last week.

Who reads our strip? I've always wanted to answer not "librarians" (though bless your heart if you are one) but "people who think it's funny." I think we've come a little closer to making that true. Welcome, new readers!