Wanted: Awards

Jumpin’ Jiminy Christmas, people!

Here I am, giving away FREE MONEY and I’ve only gotten FOUR entries in my little contest?! What the heck does a guy have to do to get his readership to grovel at his feet? Beg? OK, if that’s what it takes then I’m just the Geek to do it! Here I am on my knees begging you to lower your standards, swallow your pride and pretend to actually like me for ONE STINKING POST on your Blog so you can win my money.

There, are you happy now?

You do realize that the $25 is in American money and not worthless Canadian Drachma, or whatever those heathens use, right? I realize that the dollar isn’t as strong as it used to be, but come on people, it’s still free money! It’s not as if you might have something better to do with your time, because you don’t. You’re probably just a lonely, social outcast with a monitor-induced tan, a made-up life and no friends, so stop pretending you have better things to do than shamelessly groveling at my feet in the hopes of winning money and get with the awarding already! It’s a well documented fact that if you’re running a Blog all you care about is yourself and how many other people in the world are willing to visit a site devoted to you thus proving once and for all that you truly are the center of the known universe.

You know I’m right, stop lying to yourself.

So, in order to get more of you to enter my stupid little contest, I have decided to increase the reward from $25 to a whopping $40! That’s right, I’m giving away EVEN MORE MONEY!!! Because I know that deep down you’re all greedy, little bastards and more money is just the incentive you need to get off your lazy butts and enter this contest.

But wait, there’s more.

I’m also going to be giving away a prize to the runner-up AND a prize to someone I will designate as Miss Congeniality, even if they’re a guy. Because I’m mean that way. These prizes will be determined based on my mood on Christmas Eve, but rest assured they will be good prizes. I’m not talking about a simple link and a hearty “Thank You”. I’m talking physical objects or maybe even more cash. So if $25 wasn’t enough to get you off your anus and up mine, then I hope to heaven above that $40 and more chances to win is.

Now get cracking, because I want my damn awards already!

Award Reward

I’m feeling the spirit.

Well, not really. But I figured that maybe since everyone else was busy spreading this “Holiday Cheer” stuff all over each other in a desperate orgy of last-minute yuletide bribery in the hopes of making up for the past years’ sins and finally receiving that tickle-me-turrets Elmo that they’ve been begging for, that I might as well join in with some “good intentions” and get my rocks off at the same time. So, while I was in the shower this morning I dreamed up a little contest. Hopefully some of you will actually enter this time because it has a cash prize.

In case you missed it, CASH PRIZE!

Yep, that’s right people. The Mighty Geek, that’s me, is going to bestow upon the winner of this little contest either $25 in PayPal money OR one item off of your Amazon wishlist costing $25 or less.

It ain’t much, but it’s $25 more than you’ve got right now.

All you’ve got to do is enter my little contest and you could be the recipient of a little bit of holiday cheer you would never have expected in a million years. But hang on there, Quickdraw McGraw. Don’t blow your wad just yet; there are rules to this here contest so be sure to read them all at least twice so you don’t screw up and come hunting me with a sawed-off shotgun and a scatter-shot present with my name on it.

But first, a little contest background.

It seems to me that around this time every year people go gaga for online Blog award type things. Almost every Blogger on the net seems to be handing out awards, or attempting to coerce their readership to nominate them or vote for them for somebody else’s silly awards. Everyone seems to be soliciting their readership to vote for them in categories like; “Best Blog In The Universe, Ever” or “Best Blog Using The Color Green And The Veranda Font” or “Most Banal Blogging Banter Involving Neutered Pets”.

It’s enough to drive a person mad.

So, since it seems to me that anyone on the web can create an award for anybody they damn well choose, I think it only fair that I get an award from everyone! Don’t you agree? Well, I bet you’ll agree when you realize that that’s the contest… ingrates.

Contest Rules:

  1. You must have a Blog or Online Journal to enter this contest. If you don’t have one, too bad. I can’t help it if you’re not smart enough to go to Blogger and create one simply to enter and win this contest. I mean, it’s almost as if you want me to spell these things out for you in advance or just give the money away for nothing. Sheesh!
  2. On your Blog, create an award, any award, and designate me or my website as the winner. (Hint: it helps if you actually link to my site) The award can be for anything, anything at all, and in any form. You could designate me the winner of the YourBlog’s “Best Blogger” award, or if you’re feeling creative you can create a picture of a trophy and an award category like, “Blog Most Likely To Cause Projectile Vomiting” and present it to me on your site. Whatever makes you happiest. Use your imagination or, if your imagination is on vacation this week, then borrow somebody else’s. I don’t care.
  3. Come back to this site and leave a comment on this post and this post only with a link to my award on your site.
  4. On Thursday evening at 11:59 EST, I will close the comments for this post and then begin viewing my awards. On Friday, Christmas Eve, I will chose the award that I find to be the best based solely on my own opinion and nothing else. The winner might be the funniest, saddest, most offensive, least offensive or even the last award I look at because I’m tired and it’s fricking Christmas. Whatever I choose, my decision is final.
  5. The winner will be posted here, with a link to their site and the winning award. The winner will then contact me through email to collect their prize.

Now get busy. I’ve got an acceptance speech to give.

*** UPDATE ***

The Polls are now closed! If you didn’t enter, guess what?! You didn’t win!

The Long Weekend

Busy, busy, busy.

As most of you know, and as some of you don’t, HoBiscuit and I moved into our new apartment in mid August. Now, as some of you might know, and most of you don’t, since we moved in we’ve been living out of boxes and suitcases. This is not because of our busy schedules or our innate laziness, but because we have actually been physically detained from unpacking our belongings into our apartment thus making it our home. I can see you scratching your heads in puzzlement at that bit of knowledge so allow me to elaborate with a single sentence of clarity that will enlighten you as to our predicament.

We have no closets.

Well, that’s not entirely true. You see, we do have closets but only if your definition of “closet” is ‘a small, virtually unusable space sectioned off behind cheap, hollow doors but without any actual shelves or bars upon which to place or hang items you wish to put away.’ But, should you define “closet” as ‘a cabinet or enclosed recess for linens, household supplies, or clothing’, then we are well and truly screwed.

As you can imagine, this hampers the unpacking part of moving in to a new home.

Well, you may now be making faces at the monitor as you attempt to convey your disbelief at our misfortune. “Why,” you may be shouting at asking the screen, “didn’t you just have the guys who remodeled your kitchen build you some closets?” Good question! Let’s explore that, shall we? But first, because you obviously don’t recall how much we absolutely loved our kitchen contractors, allow me to refresh your memory by supplying you with this fine tidbit of information about them; they SUCKED! The fine and upstanding people who built us our kitchen did everything absolutely, totally and 100% WRONG. Need proof? Go ahead and read this and then come back here. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Back? Good.

Perhaps now you’ll understand why we were a tad reluctant to ask our kitchen contractors to do anything beyond the scope of what we had originally hired them to do. I mean, it took them a total of SIX attempts to install the cabinets properly. And they had to redo the doors more times than that because every time they took them down to stain them they kept messing them up!

Idiots.

And thus, Keystone Kops Construction was crossed off our short list of closet makers. Last week we finally found a closet company who we felt was offering a good price for making our closets and we signed them up. Of course, it dawned on us that now that all the construction was done and we would finally be getting our closets, it might be a really good idea to paint the fricking house and then unpack everything that wasn’t going into the closets. As we surveyed our unpainted apartment and did some quick mental math, we came to the conclusion that if we attempted to paint it ourselves we would wind up in divorce court, the hospital or jail.

Or, much more likely, I’d be dead and HoBiscuit would be happy.

Not wanting HoBiscuit to ever be happy, especially when her happiness so depends upon my untimely death, we hired painters. Now, I must say that these guys did one hell of a great painting job. They painted everything we wanted painted and absolutely nothing that we didn’t. Even better, when they realized that some of the paint we had was of a different shade than we had originally asked for, they not only informed us before they painted with it, but they also had one of their guys come with us to the paint store to make sure we didn’t pay for the new paint.

Now that’s service.

However, being that I’m a neurotic, anal retentive bastard, I didn’t want them to move my computer stuff or my home theater equipment when they painted. So, Friday morning I woke up at 6am and began moving boxes. And kept moving boxes all day. By midnight I had moved everything I could out of every room in the house and piled them all into the living room. When the painters arrived they were amazed that I had gone through such lengths to keep them from touching my stuff, and laughed at the little “Painter Guys, Do Not Touch” signs I had put on several boxes. After watching how careful they were while they painted the house, I felt comfortable enough with them that when they were ready to paint the living room I let them move most of the stuff while I nervously watched from afar.

And I do mean nervously. I was even wringing my hands and sweating.

Anywaste, now the apartment is painted and I’m actually in the process of unpacking things into their proper places (except for closet stuff, of course). It’s a great feeling; unpacking into a new home. And even though we’ve been living here for almost six months it’s never felt like home because we’ve never really unpacked. But all that’s going to change, this will be our home. We’re very excited and once we’re all settled we’ll finally have ourselves our first home.

But first, does anyone know how to get rid of that nauseating ‘new paint’ smell?

Law And Disorder

“Hey Bub,” said Bread, “We need to talk.”

He said this as he planted himself in front of my chair, thus blocking my view of the TV, and gave me the hairy eyeball. And in his case, his eyeball actually is hairy, making this particular stare all the more effective as a method of conveying curious anger to others. Startled out from the mesmerizing view on the screen, it took me a moment or two to refocus on who was talking to me.

This did not improve Bread’s mood.

“Bub, what the frick is wrong with you lately?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean your fricking site, ya moron.”
“What’s wrong with my site? Did I get comment spammed to death again?”
“No. But at least that would be fricking interesting!”
“Hey! Are you trying to say I’m not interesting anymore?”
“Bub, you’re so far from interesting I can’t believe you’re able to convince your fricking heart to fricking beat without bribery!”
“That… That’s… That…”
“Yeah?!”
“That’s the dumbest analogy I’ve ever heard!”
“Oh yeah?! Then try this one on for size; Your Blog is about as interesting and funny as the turd I left in your box of Apple Jacks! How you like ‘dem apples?!”

I was flabbergasted.

“I don’t believe it.”
“Well, believe it Bub! It was a nice smelly one, too. And even though it might look it, I know for a fact I didn’t eat any corn in the last few days…”
“No, no, no. Not that. I knew about that already. I’m talking about the other thing. You really don’t think I’m funny anymore? Really?”
“Bub, last time I looked, no one thought writing ‘lunchity-lunch-lunch’ was funny. Not even a little bit.”

That hit too close to home for my taste.

“That was just an off day. I’ll get better real soon, you’ll see.”
“Oh yeah, sure. NOT!
“How can you be so cruel?”
“Get off the can and face the music, Bub. Your writing’s gotten so bad lately it reminds me of the time you were so obsessed with that fricking game I kept beating you at that you stopped doing anything else but playing it for a week.”
“Heh. Funny you should bring that up…”
“I mean, if I didn’t know better I’d swear you wuz playing Halo 2 even though you swore to your friends that you wouldn’t open your copy of the game until such time as they could all come to your house and play with you.”
“Ah… Bread…”
“And looking up there at the shelf I can see that your copy of Halo 2 is still in its shiny wrapper.”
“Uh, right. But…”
“So, what the frick is wrong with you that your writing has taken long walk off a short pier?”

Sighing, I pointed at the TV.

“Holy Juan Valdez on a greased up pogo stick! Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah, Bread. It is.”
“You’re playing Halo 2?! Without your friends?! More importantly, without me?!”
“Well, I thought a month and a half head start was good enough for everyone else, so I just…”
“Wait a second here, Bub. Don’t tell me you bought a second copy of Halo 2 just so you could play it.”
“Not exactly.”

Bread looked about ready to kill me, so I hastily wiped the condescending smile from my face and explained.

“You know how Mr. ModChip came with all those games pre-installed?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, it turns out that I can actually add games to his hard drive! So I went out and borrowed a friends copy and then copied it to the hard drive and…”

A look passed across Bread’s face so quickly that I nearly missed it. Something that I hadn’t seen on his face in all the years that I’ve known him, a look that I was hard pressed to describe until I recalled the look on my mothers face the day when I finally managed to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Bread was impressed.

“Bub, that’s pretty slick of you.”
“Thanks Bread.”
“But what about your friends? Won’t they be pissed that you’re playing the game without them?”
“I don’t know, Bread. I mean, technically I’m still following the rules, you know?”

By this time Bread had managed to dig out another controller from a box and was plugging it into Mr. ModChip.

“Bub, I’m not following you.”
“I never said I wouldn’t play Halo 2 without them. I just said I wouldn’t open my copy of the game. And since my copy is right there on the shelf still wrapped in its wrapper…”

Bread smiled.

“Bub, you would make one hell of a sleazy lawyer.”
“Wow. You really think so?”
“Yeah Bub, I do.”
“Thanks.”
“Welcome. Now shut up and check your six, ‘cause I think you’re about to receive your first rocket enema of the day!”

And so I did.

Finding FishMan

My brother is officially famous.

Originally, I had a post ready for today about how mutant llamas were creating robotic duplicates of all my friends so they could torment me with petty insults in their diabolical bid to take over the world, but a funny thing happened as I sat down at the computer this morning.

I had an email.

Normally this wouldn’t be a surprise, because I’m such a celebrity and all that, so I’m used to getting 100’s of emails a day from my adoring fans. I was about to file this email away with all the others in the humorously mislabeled folder called ‘Trash’ in my email reading program when I realized there was something different about this particular piece of mail. It took a minute to dawn on me, but when it did I realized that this email didn’t seem to be from one of my millions of adoring fans. I could tell because for the first time ever this wasn’t a helpful email from a fan with news about some penile enlargement pills, online card games, naked pictures of b-list celebrities or even more mail-order anal hamsters packed in cardboard tubes for easy shipping.

What can I say; I like to play “special” games with my pets.

Anywaste, this particular email was from none other than Papaya, my brother FishMan’s wife. In it she mentioned that my brother’s store had gotten a write-up in New York Magazine! The article is short but still sings the praises of my brother’s shop and I couldn’t be prouder. They even mentioned his website, Aquatic Creations, which I must say was designed by the most brilliant, talented, intelligent, gifted, exceptional… and humble, web site designer in the known universe. I hope all of you take a moment of your time to go visit Fishman, either on his website or in person at his shop, and tell him how beautiful and wonderful his website is and how he should do something really, really, really, really nice for the designer this holiday season. Oh, and if you want, you could congratulate him on the NY Magazine thing, too.

But don’t forget to praise that amazingly great, yet modest, designer!

Munchies

I like lunch.

Of all the meals I eat during the day lunch happens to be, if not my favorite, at least in the top five. Possibly even in the top three. Lunch even sounds fun. Truly, it does. Don’t you agree? Come on, say it with me; “Lunch. Lunch, lunch, lunchity-lunch lunch.”

Holy crap. I’m so hungry I could eat my own head.

Gold Stars For Everyone!

Web Log Awards season is upon us again, and this year instead of simply keeping quiet I’m going to go ahead and speak my mind. In fact, I’m not even going to spell check or take the time to craft this post into my usual format of short paragraph, statement, short paragraph. I’m not even going to try to make it funny. I’m just going to speak my mind for once and let the dust settle where it will and if I upset some people so be it, because what I really want to do is make everyone think about these awards in a different light and maybe, just maybe, change them into something much better for everyone. You see, when I look around the internet I see that people who are taking these things as seriously as if they were some kind of REAL awards ceremony and I don’t understand why because they’re not.

Now, hold on there, Sparky. Don’t get all righteous on me just yet.

I know what you’re thinking right now and you’re wrong. This isn’t a bitter post of hatred towards the awards by an angry, disgruntled writer who didn’t get nominated for something even though he thinks he’s all that and a bag of dried monkey snot. The truth is that I have been nominated for these things in the past and I’ve even won a couple.

But so what?

All of the so-called awards being given out by these well-meaning Bloggers are good for an ego boost but not much else. They’re basically a popularity contest, where the Blog with the biggest, most loyal readership wins every time regardless of whether they deserve the win or not. That’s why I believe that even though I’m sure the people running the awards sites are doing everything they can to be fair and unbiased; they are unfortunately merely perpetuating a really big high-school clique-fest.

And every year it’s the same. He, or she, with the most friends; wins.

And before someone writes me an angry email saying that those who have the most popular sites DO deserve to win because they are so popular, let me state here and now that you’re wrong. Well, you’re wrong if the goal of the award is to reward excellence and not popularity. There is a very big difference between being popular and being a shining star of Blogging excellence. For an example of what I mean we need look no further than the music industry. Britney Spears, Ashlee Simpson and Outkast are some of the most popular artists out there right now but how many of you would ever hold their repertoire up as an impeccable example of musical perfection to your grandchildren? You might like them and enjoy them, but I doubt you could keep a straight face if you were trying to claim they deserved accolades for their musical talent.

To reiterate, popular does not mean extraordinary. It just means popular.

Now I’m not one to simply spout off without having some sort of solution in mind, and this is no exception. I do have an idea as to what would help “legitimize”, for lack of a better term, these awards. Basically, the main problem with ALL of the Blogging Awards as they now stand is the fact that they’re voted on by the general public. However, if you remove the general public from the entire proceedings then no one will actually care enough to tune in and thus the awards themselves stagnate and die. So what I’d like to see, what I think the Blogging community needs now that it has finally grown into something more than a small collection of hobby sites into an exceedingly large and diverse group of mostly personal websites, is a better method of soliciting nominations and voting on the nominees. Something that will also help the winners feel that they are actually winning something, even if that something is just the respect of people they believe to be their peers in the Blogging community.

It wouldn’t hurt if there were a statue or certificate, though.

Now, I’m no statistician, but it seems to me that there has to be a way of incorporating general public voting with a sort of elite group of opinion leaders who would do the final voting and/or tallying to discern the eventual winners. Something like an amalgam of the Academy Awards and American Idol, whereby the public at large has a say in the outcome, but a small group of respected peers in the Blogging community also have a say, thereby keeping the awards from degenerating into a popularity contest. I’m just talking off the cuff here, but I think it might work something like this;

  1. The general public nominates whoever they think is worthy for each category,
  2. The top XX in each category are then presented to a small group of highly regarded reviewers/bloggers for review,
  3. This elite group votes for the 5 Blogs in each category they believe to be the best,
  4. (If applicable) These 5 Blogs are then contacted and must submit a single post from the past year that they believe exemplifies why they should win in their category,
  5. The general public, or better yet, an ever-expanding ‘Academy’ of past Blog Awards winners, then votes for the winners.

With this system, or one like it, the award truly becomes a mark of recognition by your blogging peers, and not simply a popularity contest decided upon by mob mentality. Not only that, but it also makes it that much harder to cheat since real people need to review the nominees and possibly even vote on the winners. No automatic web-scripts will influence the results and so I believe that those people who actually make it to the final five in each category will actually feel that they HAVE been honored, that perhaps they are being recognized not only by the general public, but by people who they themselves might look up to and admire.

Say what you will about how elitist this system might sound to you now, but if you found yourself in the final five and knew that people out there who’s writing you admired had actually liked your writing enough to nominate you, I bet you’d be thrilled.

And really, isn’t that what an award is all about?

Undercover Fears

Shudder.

Last night I woke up at around 5am frightened out of my mind because I truly believed that there was a monster in the room that was millimeters, and milliseconds, away from devouring my left foot. It took a while for me to wake up, too. Like, almost two whole seconds, which can feel like forever when a hungry monster you can barely make out in the darkness is about to consume your foot.

Don’t laugh, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I was in that half-awake, half-dreaming state that feels like you’re drowning as you struggle and fight for full consciousness knowing all the while that it’s going to eat you if you don’t wake up! You can see the room you’re in because your eyes are sorta-kinda open, but because you’re also still sleeping all the shadows move and gibber like hungry demons.

Especially the moving shadow right next to your foot.

As I bolted up from my slumber and feverishly searched the room for traces of the foot eating beast, I came to the slow realization that I had been dreaming and that there was, of course, no monster in my room. Looking down I sighed in relief as I discovered that the reason for my dreamy fear was nothing more than my lovely spouse’s penchant for hogging the blankets which had left my foot exposed to the drafty elements of the room.

See? A logical explanation for everything, right?

Of course, there was nothing logical about my actions as I quickly yanked the blankets away from my sleeping wife, carefully covered every piece of exposed flesh on my body, up to and including my neck, and proceeded to lay there wide awake and in the dark for the next hour searching the shadows for signs of movement. Because we all know that the dreaded monsters under the bed cannot get you if you’re under the covers. The covers are their kryptonite; they can’t eat you as long as you make sure you’re completely covered. But they’re always hungry, they’re always watching for an opening. And they’re patient. Very, very patient.

Constant vigilance, my friends. Constant vigilance.