RALPH Hits 500,000 Hits a Month | (And Decides to Change Its Name)

For years, we've faithfully collected book reviews, poems, articles, readings and letters to appear at RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature. Philosophy and the Humanities
www.ralphmag.org
According to the official figures from our server, our site gets an imposing number of hits, some 15,000 - 20,000 on an average weekday. Hits, in the industry, are defined as someone on a computer somewhere, during a certain pre-determined period, taking a gander at one of the thousands of pages that we've put up in hyperspace. It all adds up to almost half-a-million visitors a month.
In our day, we have reviewed more than 5,000 titles from publishers large and small, from across the world, and the magazine appears every three or four weeks, has been doing so since 1995. We passed the 150 issue mark in Late Summer, 2006.
Our present name, RALPH, has a more troublesome history. On occasion, we are confused with an on-line fondle magazine from Australia, originally funded by, of all people, Bill Gates. Their homepage tells us that this beer-and-bust RALPH gets more than 8,500,000 hits a day, that over 70% of Australian computers have logged on to the various protuberances offered there.
Still, the word RALPH may have more pleasant associations for others. Ralph Ellison of The Invisible Man, perhaps; the lusty Renaissance drama Ralph Roister Doister. Some may be reminded of the metaphysician Ralph Waldo Emerson, (A weed is a plant whose virtues have not been discovered.) Those who live in the west coast shopping belt may even think of a certain supermarket: we get calls every day asking about our bologna or biscuits or bagels.
To our dismay, we have found a certain reluctance of publishers to cite our full name. Ohio University Press excerpted our highly complimentary review of Volume II of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft in their press releases. Cuatros Vientos of Chile cited The Lourdes of Arizona. Aliform Publishing quoted our loving review of the exquisite Master of the Sea, a novel by a past president of Brazil. But every one of them dropped the word RALPH from their citations. We decided that we might as well do the same.
Thus, from this day on, we will be known simply as The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, even though our on-line address will stay the same. We will continue to parse out the on-line magazine every three weeks or so; at odd times, we will send out a hard-copy of what we believe to be our best reviews; and we will continue to publish our sometimes amiable sometimes ecstatic sometimes scurrilous reviews, along with worthy readings, original articles, poetry that no one anywhere else seems to get, and --- as always --- the loving, angry, wondering, sometimes sneering letters ("Where in hell do you find those reviewers?")
All this will continue ... without the RALPH.