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A blog makes a fine pet, I suppose. You don't have to feed it, though it's a bit like a cat you have to knit fresh every few days from scratch, on the other hand; otherwise, it's just aesthetic taxidermy.

So happy birthday, little pet blog! I think these entries have to start "X years ago, I got it in my head to etc. etc." Well, two years ago, I started doing this with no idea of the fame and fortune that would follow. As I sit here in my Central Park West penthouse, acquired with the lucre of opera blogging...

Real story of course, as I may have explained last year: I started writing whatever bullshit popped into my head and now several people read it. And I thank all several of you for doing so, and thank you again for commenting. Sincerely. The exchange of [pick one: ideas, witticisms, raw snark, coded aggression, bourgeois banalities] is the whole point of this. To put it in context, I'm creeping up on my 100,000th hit, whereas I think Perez Hilton gets like 8 million hits per day. So I think from a statistical standpoint you could say that nobody has ever read this blog, including you. In the grand scheme of things, you are doing something else right now.

But anything that contributes to a sense of community is good in my book*, and just as the devoted found the mothership of Parterre back in the day, I hope this little network--please see blogroll, and the blogroll of those people--of opera fans and singers and so on, yammering on a virtual street corner (how many times, he thought, I have used the verb "to yammer" since starting a blog. what, I wonder, does it mean?) can contribute to that feeling of being among one's own. It's lovely to be a tiny part of that. If MFI is the corner of a cushion on a barstool in a virtual, operatic Cheers, rah!

Before I dispense with this round of sentimentality, I do have to say: through various stories that are almost funny enough to constitute a failed film script, I've met some fine and peculiar individuals in ways involving (oh, for instance) a blog, 2/3 of an operetta, pomegranates, and a traffic jam on 10th Avenue. For these things, I am willing to forgive life's failure to reward blogging with park view penthouses.

*well that's probably an overly general statement since Hitler created a really rather impressively strong sense of community, for example.