The Fallen

I just finished up some housekeeping on the site, trimming outdated links and removing dead ones, and I'm struck by how many Utica area blogs have gone silent. Not that I'm one to point a finger, what with effectively abandoning the Snakepit from last September to January of this year, but I'm still rather surprised by the death toll. I would have thought that over time there would have been *more* voices raised, but instead there's been a steady decline. Which probably shouldn't be surprising, since "steady decline" increasingly appears to be the official motto of the Utica area

To be honest I'm still a bit ambivalent about my own efforts to keep the Snakepit active. It's not like the area's politics have much impact on me anymore, other than making what property my family still owns in the area even less attractive, but I still find the level of corruption and incompetence that Oneida County's politicians are capable of simply amazing. The population may be plummeting, jobs may be heading south with the regularity of birds migrating for the winter, but you can always rely on the local gladhanders to excel at failure.

As if that wasn't enough, here's something that should raise a few eyebrows. Since midnight last night I've had two hits from Google searches for "hotel utica closing", one from Beacon, New York and the other from Sharon, Mississippi. While folks using Google end up here via some odd searches, including things like "utica boobies", it does seem a little odd how popular that particular search is this morning, especially considering how geographically separated the two points are.

Oh, one last thing. Dyslexic writer + broken Blogger spellcheck = potentially incomprehensible posts. I can catch most things with the help of Firefox's built in spellchecker, but cut me some slack until it's fixed.