Who is Cristina Carlino?

(Another entry in the most-read blog posts of 2011. Almost every day, the words Cristina Carlino lead people to my blog. At least it makes more sense now that I've actually written those words!)

When I first started my blog, I checked my stats all the time. I was constantly – seriously, hourly – checking to see if anyone was stopping by my little corner of the internet. Not smart. While the reason I write my blog is mainly for myself, no writer wants to go unread. So after a while I stopped the masochistic exercise and didn’t look at my numbers for a while.

Over the years, I’ve gained a few readers (thank you, thank you, thank you!) and tracking my page views has become less depressing. On a recent peek at my stats, I checked to see what search words were landing people at my site. Some were obvious – Where I Am, Christy, Amy Grant, 2 Friends Tour. One surprise was Kyrie O'Connor, from Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me. But there are three words that put people on my page even more than those. I suppose this shows my lack of search word know-how, but for the life of me I cannot understand how people searching for these words are ending up here:

Cristina Carlino divorce

Straight to Google went I. Who the heck is Cristina Carlino? Was she ever married? Is she divorced now or did they patch things up?  Here’s what I found: “Cristina Carlino is best known as a visionary entrepreneur who created philosophy,” which is a line of cosmetics. I rarely write about cosmetics, so I still didn’t see the connection with her name and my blog.

I moved on to the divorce portion of our program. I must be a really bad Google-r, because I couldn’t find anything official to indicate whether or not she’s married, much less divorced. I did find a chat group where one person said she’s divorced and another said she's not. Certainly nothing in the way of a credible source said anything at all about her married status.

Then I decided to search just, “Cristina Carlino.” And what do you know, my little blog popped up. What in the world? Well, it seems back on April 30, 2009, I posted a press release about AG and her (then) newest song, She Colors My Day. Guess who wrote the song? Yep: Cristina Carlino. I didn't even remember it.  Sheesh.

So the mystery of why Cristina Carlino keeps coming up on my stats page has been solved. I didn’t need Google; all I needed was to search my own blog.

I think I’ll go back to not checking the stats again for a while…