Apache KeepAlive: it kills more blogs than cancer.
For learning about this general subject, I recommend the YSlow presentations.
I'm the administrator of the box running the blog. I'm also colm@apache.org, one of the authors of Apache httpd. KeepAlive's are enabled on the host, but with a deliberate timeout of 1 second. The listen backlog is 25, which can contribute to a backlog looking like the above but it isn't.
The hosted ended up getting wedged due to poor MySQL contention, there is a limit of just 80 server processes (and hence connections - we're running pre-fork on this host), and they were each getting blocked on MySQL reads.
That's been sorted now, and some better caching, compression and more put in place. It's a 1Ghz, 1GB RAM box is a colo that got slammed by HN, Reddit and Techcrunch in one go - to an uncached wordpress instance. I'm surprised it did as well as it did ;-)