Local Gadfly is Born

So when Brittany Turner, in musing on New Paltz's write in campaign for Town Council, referred to me in passing as a "local gadfly," I was amused and honored. And annoyed, but not at Brittany.

• Amused. I didn't realize I was such a pain in the ass that anyone actually ever noticed me.
• Honored. It's a title my father would have worn proudly, so I can only imagine that he is proud of me now.
• Annoyed. My fifteen minutes of fame is fleeting, because the online archive of Ms. Turner's editorial is not forever. I have discovered, in my secret life as a Wikipedia editor, that one cannot easily cite any Ulster Publishing article as a source there, because they eventually (read: in a year or so) take down the information! Not so with real newspapers, and a pretty crappy policy overall. Mind you, I don't care if me being listed as a gadfly is immortalized, really; the whole situation just reminded me of how cheap Ulster Publishing is that they purge their old articles from the web.

So I'm a gadfly, local to New Paltz, and the mantle of gadflydom has been thrust upon me. I figured I might best live up to these vast responsibilities by creating a blog that no one will ever notice. Yes, I could just write in a journal at home and know that nobody was reading it, but there's something satisfying about knowing that someday, perhaps long after I'm gone, my words will have meaning to somebody.
After all, Google owns Blogger, and they don't purge their database of old material.