Let the madness begin...

I'm a late bloomer when it comes to the blogosphere. I didn't even start reading them until last summer, when the CBC lockout created a flurry of blogs all spouting righteous indignation. Talk about cool!

Over the years I've gone through phases of journal-writing. I've even had jags of letter-writing that might have been worthy of an epistolary novel - if anything interesting happened, that is. The simple fact is that I've spent a great deal of my life actually writing things for a living. And now I'm going to do it for fun? What am I, nuts?

I think this blog is really about catharsis. I'm going to be curmudgeonly, I'm going to vituperate (as you'll soon learn, I love parenthetical comments almost as much as I love using big words) and I think I'm going to have a damn fine time doing it.

Why did I pick Voltaire2006 as a nom de plume? Simple. I think that if François Marie Arouet were alive today, he would be - holy crap - 311 years old. Wait a minute; what I *meant* to say was that if he were alive today, he and I would probably get along just fine. He'd still be 311 years old, though, so I could probably take him in a fair fight. Voltaire had a bit of a problem with authority figures (although he was apparently a great schmoozer), and hated bigotry, pedantry and, above all, intolerance. I think I could advance a strong argument that he may well have been the first curmudgeon. And who doesn't have a big ol' soft spot for the curmudgeons of this world?

I have no idea what the future holds for this blog. I might get tired of it in a week, or it may become a valuable therapeutic tool. Who knows? Someone out there in the blogosphere might even read this. I look forward to your comments.