The boys from Brazil came by in 2009

When I get my annual list of the top stories from the previous year, I am sometimes surprised to see that something published in the previous year is still a top drawer in the following year.

But this has never happened before.

One of the very first stories I did here was on an open source project in Brazil called Javali. It ran in December, 2004, when I was still technically "on loan" from Corante, before I moved over to ZDNet full time.

It's a short piece, concerning a Java implementation. I learned in the course of my work that voting machines in that country run on Java, and that the country is becoming dependent on it.

Not a big story. Not an important story.

But it was the 17th most popular story on this site. For 2009. It had over 13,000 page views

There is a very important point to be made here. While we try at ZDNet to stay on top of the news, and this is a straight news story, the Web also has a long memory, and many readers benefit enormously from our ability to maintain what old-timey newspapers would call an extensive "morgue."

My guess is that this high traffic was driven in part by events down in Brazil. I'd love to know what they were so I could cover more completely.

Any ideas? And to test whether you're really Brazilian, riddle me this. Is this a good feijoada recipe? And don't try to fool me on this one, either. My sister-in-law grew up in Brazil, and her decisions are always final.