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Thursday, October 13, 2005

More lefty pitching

From the good people at Wampum comes a notice (oh, all right, it was posted last week, but here at michaelberube.com, our office clocks have a week hand and a month hand) about next year’s Koufax Awards.

MB Williams writes: 

While it’s great to win the top prize in the awards, the best part of the event is the showcasing of hundreds of blogs, posts and commentors which are often overlooked, or too quickly forgotten in the lightning speed of cyberspace today. As the years have passed, the number of nominations have increased exponentially, with over a thousand nominees last year alone. Personally, while it means a lot more work, we here think this is a very good thing.

Well, this diffident blog didn’t win any top prizes, but making the finals and picking up a couple Honorable Mentions almost doubled my daily traffic.  (Thanks, everyone!) For me, the highlight of last year’s Koufaxes was watching Amanda Marcotte, of whose Mouse Words I had not heard prior to their Koufaxization, hand me and James Wolcott our asses in the “best new blog” category.  She was very gracious about it at the time:  “Messrs. Bérubé?  Wolcott?  Vos derrières, s’il vous plait.” People with French-Canadian surnames sometimes speak that way, you know.  Actually her real—even more gracious—response is here in comments, alongside my own votes for 2004.  And now that she’s blogging away at Pandagon, where, of late, she’s managed to extract the venom from some of the right blogosphere’s slimier denizens (yes, I know, they’ll make more—it’s an infinitely renewable resource), this is a good moment to thank the Koufax Award process for bringing her to worldwide blogging prominence.  Her and people like Lindsay Beyerstein, Susie Madrak, Brad Friedman, and the very possibly charismatic N. Todd Pritsky, just to name a few.

Anyway, here’s why they’re fundraising now.  For plenty of good reasons:

One, we’d like to spread it out over a greater length of time, as not everyone is flush with cash at the same time of the month. Also, we don’t want to compete with the holiday season, when wallets are already overstretched (even more so this year, with rising energy costs.) On our end, we’d like to plan for our added expenses up front, so we don’t end up with unexpected disruptions like we did last year. Lastly, fundraising during the awards itself always has felt weird to us, as we fear that some might see an opportunity for vote buying by donations from nominees. By holding the drive in advance, we feel we can avoid any appearance of such conflict of interest, so to speak. If you want to rig the election, it will take a wicked large check to stand out in our easily distracted minds.

The awards have always meant to be fun and informative. This year, our plans are to hold them on my and Eric’s end while joining in relief/reconstruction efforts along the Gulf Coast (where we had planned to spend December and January even before the disaster occurred). Our goal is to help to keep the pressure on, even if the media is engaged elsewhere with missing white women and the like.

Those sound like good plans.  So head on over to Wampum with that wicked large check already.  Tell ‘em my friend Jack Abramoff sent you!

John McGowan will check in later today with a followup to last week’s post, and then he’ll be off until early November.  And yeah, one of these days we’ll get around to updating the blogroll, which hasn’t been touched since the month hand was pointing to March or something.

Posted by Michael on 10/13 at 12:29 PM
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