Go shorty, it's your birthday

There’s a piecing noise bouncing from the walls and it sounds somewhat like an alarm clock. The eyes thrust open and focus on a collection of cobwebs lying dormant in a previously obscure corner. You briefly ponder why the alarm clock is ringing on a Saturday, before throwing your feet to the floor and suddenly realizing your bad knee is acting up.

Pain courses through the temples, and darkness briefly encroaches on the peripheral vision. Get to the bathroom, stat; find some painkillers. The alarm is still ringing, but it’s taken a back seat to procuring some elixir in pill form. You grab a handful and start crunching, when you realize it’s not the faulty joint that’s acting up.

Instead, it’s the after effects of drinking the better part of a cheap wine flagon. You remember this around the same time you’re posterior crashes onto the floor after tripping over the aforementioned flagon, which lies amid a bizarre scattering of candles and literature; a worn copy of the Dubliners, an unkempt pile of newspapers, and the LL Bean catalogue curiously opened to the plus-sized swimsuit page.

Joe Bruno’s name is circled on one of the newspaper pages and a model displaying the ‘Tankini’ cut suit is labeled Marcia White. What does it all mean?

Then it dawns on you; a late night conversation, addled on Chianti and musing about the Senate Majority leader’s coddling of the Saratoga Performing Art Center’s director; it’s all making sense in some twisted way. The alarm is still ringing, but really it’s just a calamitous hammering from the construction outside. That’s strange, you think. They don’t do construction on Saturdays.

So it’s Friday, you have a crippling hangover and you’re three hours late for work. But you also have this desire to pontification about the sordid affair between an aging senator and his former press secretary. You head to the computer terminal, but the words aren’t flowing from your fingers. You try to think of something catchy or something humorous, but can only think of a movie scene where Danny Glover is sitting on a toilet bowel wired to a weight-sensitive bomb:

“I’m too old for this shit.”

Indeed, and getting older by the minute. Friday marked the dawning of the terrible twos for iSaratoga. Though the site has changed ever so slightly, the essential gist is the same. It’s just two years older. With that said, there is certainly more traffic than during the inaugural years. In about 18 months, there have been roughly 71,000 web crawlers who have skulked onto this blog for one reason or another.

Prior to 2007, the main draw for readers seemed to be a picture of high-grade marijuana posted here during the previous year. But in late January 2007, a posting about former News 9 anchor Kristina Krawchuk put iSaratoga on the media map. Several months later, iSaratoga became a battle ground during the mayoral campaign and the rest is history. During this time, this author has been accused of just about everything under the sun –‘a green-sneaker’ trying to forward fruitless environmental pursuits to a pro-development Republican shill.

Postings have slowed down a bit since the early days and the traffic has leveled off since the tumultuous election. All told, iSaratoga has about 150 daily readers who faithfully log on and mill about the various threads. On a daily basis, the site routinely gets about 400 hits. But a good contingent of these hits are from the aforementioned stoners trying to get a glimpse of the bubonic chronic, maybe thinking if they print the picture out and smoke it, they might get high.

Even with this modest number of hits, iSaratoga has gotten its fair share of shout-outs at Albany’s Times Union’s Web site, Skidmore Professor Bob Turner’s politics page, the fledgling All over Albany blog and in the Tech Valley Times. This humble moderator has also conversed with a number of area reporters and editors in the process, opening the channels of dialog and bridging the gap between the dodgy blogosphere and the world of mass media. All things said, this blog has grown at a pace and prosperity that was never imagined by it’s extremely hung over author.

But that which doesn’t evolve runs the risk of growing stagnant. And it seems the passing of iSaratoga’s second anniversary would be an ideal time to ask readers their thoughts on the direction of this site.

There are some changes in store, but nothing too dramatic. Posts might get a bit more frequent, a little less wordy and a bit more expanded to the events transpiring outside of the city limits. These are just some musings to provoke thoughts on this anniversary. At risk of sounding hackneyed, keep reading, keep commenting. Intelligent dialogue is the voice of a vibrant democracy.