We are One.

I mean that not in the Buddhist sense, but in the calendrical sense. Happy Birthday to this blog. Apparently, we are Aquariuses. Aquarii. We are shape-sorting, taking our first steps, and responding with smiles and giggles to those who smile and wave at us. This is a cute time for us. Let's take a moment to reflect on all that's happened in the year since Simplicius laid the foundations for Blogging the Renaissance with this memorable nugget, back on Sunday, February 19th, 2006. 228 posts... and we still haven't solved the riddle posed by so many google searchers who arrive accidentally at this site: "What happened during the Renaissance?" Well, here's some of what happened when it got blogged. We said snarky things in posts on conferences that we then removed when it became clear to us that basically everyone who reads the blog had figured out who we are. (Rest assured that this year's set on SAA and RSA will revolve around the weather and how nice it was to see old friends and how kick-ass all the panels were.) We invented a new language -- EEBOnics! -- and we still speak it some. We added a needed bit of archival absurdity to The New Yorker's Cartoon Caption contest. Anyone can think up a caption for two giraffes waiting on line at Starbucks, but only a privileged few can do it for some 16th-century bird-eating maniac. We kind of made good on our promise to discuss recent critical work. (One book per year from this point on sounds about right to me.) We completely failed to make good on our promise to create an on-line Holzknecht supplement, though I hear someone's got something in the works soon... We made some new electronic friends, which, I have to say, has been one of the true pleasures of this project. We caught the attention of the Nation's letters editor and the nefarious Malcolm Kline and some really crazy hater who had the nerve to call us "pseudo-intellectuals." If you can believe that. He got intellectualized all over the place in the comments section. We wrote more poetry than we probably expected to. We became the number one internet resource for the surprisingly large number of students forced to write essays on Drayton's Sonnet 61 (literally 10 to 20 hits a day -- hi students! your professors can find this site, too! ps: it's all about Looooove). I guess my co-bloggers will have things to add on this momentous anniversarie. I, for one, am glad we're doing it. Here's to many more.