This is the 300th post on A Beast in a Jungle and what a nice number to mark its one year anniversary under this name and this URL.

First of all, thank you so much to the people who've found this blog and keep reading it. I appreciate it and it's been a source of great pleasure for me to write.

A few of you know this blog was originally called "The Ambassador Roams High and Low"and had a different URL. After changing it (not by choice), I lost most of the readers I'd slowly built up over eight months The Ambassador was up. After A Beast's first month the visitor stats registered only 40% of what it had been for the last couple of months of the Ambassador. I suspect that traffic was driven largely through the kindness of other bloggers who agreed to update the links from the old blog to the new.

What a difference a year makes. The number of visits to this blog last month were greater than the entire visit count for the Ambassador's entire eight months. Lately I've been watching the visitor count grow every month and every month I think it will go back down but there hasn't been a dip since March and this month seems to be on track to eclipse the last, much to my surprise.

Again my thanks to the readers, the other blogs who have linked to this one and the cast of characters: The Minister's Rebellious Daughter, Chad Newsome, Maria Gostrey, both Swedes, GG, CC, General Chang, Penelope, the Greek, the Femme Fatale, Dr. Hank, Maggie the Cat, Madame Merle, Herr Feldheim, Patrick, the Opera Tattler and of course, the Little Chinese Man.