Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Having only stumbled upon blogging less than two years ago, even then the number of blogs was overwhelming and so I picked and chose what I read carefully. My other two associated problems of being a slow reader and having a compulsion to keep up to date with everything I read, made it so that I was reluctant to look at lots of blogs. So I just don’t have the familiarity I should with some very popular blogs which, being a blogger, I probably should!

Luckily, there this is the second year that the Weblog Awards have been given out, based on votes from anyone. You can vote once per day from a given IP address, which doesn’t avoid cheating, but the ability to use bots theoretically hampers those who want to really stack the deck! Certainly it’s not a definitive list, and of course popularity doesn’t equal quality, but of course it’s a starting point and will probably be really helpful as a starting place for anyone new to the Blogosphere, and I for one am going to take this as an opportunity to expand the reading I do a bit, god help me!

On a personal note, I was not nominated for any of the categories that I might have fit in, like Best Tech Blog, Photo Blog, or even Best of the Rest of the Blogs. I do, though, want to congratulate Engadget for being the top Tech Blog, which I think it really deserves, but also the close runner up, Gizmodo, which is a very useful and quite humorous edition to your tech reading. My friend, Eric McErlain, whom I spoke with at a white elephant party just this weekend, was hoping for a win in the Sports Blog category for his Off Wing Opinion. Unfortunately he was denied the title by Baseball Crank, and Athletics Nation somehow managed to hold onto an incredibly small lead to make Off Wing third. Congratulations are due to Eric all the same, for even getting this far in the very crowded category of Sports Blogs.

I’m no fan of Walmart, so I’m not going to lose sleep over the fact they are being sued for “damages” for everyone who bought “Anywhere But Home” by Evescence without a parents advisory label even though it contains the F-word in one of it’s songs.

But just in case your hatred for litigious idiots and moralist busybodies outweighs your hatred for town-destroying and culture-stripping superstores, perhaps this suggestion will serve. If you bought this album in Maryland (where the suit was filed), hold a press conference saying that you don’t mind this and could they please discount your purchase from the class-action number. Maybe if we all take a trip to a Maryland Walmart and buy up these CD’s (if Marylanders don’t do this themselves) we can drown out the suit by all the press releases from those who consider the f-word either inoffensive or better yet a pleasant surprise and added value!

As some of you know, I also run a dvd review site called DVDMon.com. I review dvd’s on the site along with some other reviewers and I just posted a review of Ed Wood. It’s a great movie and the DVD has a great commentary track, so if you are an Ed Wood fan, a Johnny Depp fan, or a Tim Burton Fan, you might want to check it out.