This short article which you are reading right now is estimated to be article number 10,000 which I have written for The Gate since its inception back on Friday, August 18, 2006 at 8:33 in the evening Eastern Daylight Time; and it has posted as of 2:22:22 in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time today, Tuesday, February 22, 2022 — which is also known as Twosday.
10,000 at 2:22:22 on 2.22.22. A Personal Milestone.
I say estimated because no fewer than eight other authors have written for The Gate during its earlier years — and when The Gate moved back and forth between FlyerTalk and BoardingArea, the count of who wrote what articles was thrown off and had to be manually rebuilt. I tried to do the best I can to be accurate about who wrote which article; but I do stumble across an article which was attributed to me and should have been attributed to another person — and vice versa.
I am not sure whether the number includes drafts which have not yet been published; but it does not include the articles which I wrote during a period of time prior to the official launch of The Gate when 21 other potential authors were vying for one of two spots. After a period of time where the 22 writers posted articles to The Gate without attribution — as it was not live as of yet — I was honored to be one of two FlyerTalk members who were chosen as the two original “bloggers” for The Gate. After the test period, The Gate became live in August of 2006.
In fact, The Gate was one of the original weblogs at BoardingArea when it was launched in 2008. More specifically, the first time an article of The Gate was posted at BoardingArea was on Thursday, December 27, 2007 with this short article.
Final Boarding Call
The timing of this article was purely coincidental and not planned — if it were planned, it would either have been 2,222 articles or 22,222 articles by today — but when I noticed the milestone and the unusual date of today, I figured why not post this article now?
You can read about the complete history of The Gate in this article — as well as the latest updates with the state of The Gate back on Wednesday, August 18, 2021.
In the meantime, thank you so much once again for your support. Mere words cannot ever convey my expression of gratitude, as I am grateful to you — more than you will ever know — for without you, there would be no The Gate over the past 15.5 years.
Photograph ©2020 by Brian Cohen.
