She will deny it, but my friend Peg Kaplan in beautiful (but frigid) Minnesota has been blogging for four years. Here is her inaugural post. Peg is one of the many people I have “met” online. She wrote to me out of the blue not long after I began blogging on 5 November 2003. Having received many nasty (or at least testy) e-mail messages, I was delighted to hear from someone nice. Imagine! Peg and I became quick friends, not least because she had done graduate work in philosophy and therefore understood why I wrote such strange things. She loves birds; I love dogs. She plays bridge; I ride a bike. She prefers cold winters to hot summers; I prefer hot summers to cold winters. She wanted Rudy Giuliani as our next president; I wanted Fred Thompson. We don’t agree on everything (who does?), but we respect and admire each other. Peg blames me for getting her started on her blog. Ha! You can’t make someone do something that he or she doesn’t want to do. When Peg entered the blogosphere four years ago (it seems like yesterday), she raised both its civility level and its average intelligence. Keep it up, Peg!

Addendum: For the record, Peg has had 158,383 visits to her blog. I expect her to have three times that many four years from today.