Ummm, well…seven eight Koufax nominations is rather flattering. These are the semi-finals, though, so it may well be that none of them make it to the finals, and to then actually win one is an even more unlikely eventuality, but hey, here I am.
If you want to vote, all you have to do is follow the link and mention the entry or blog you like in a comment. This is a sensible left-wing blog, so unlike those weird wingers, you only vote once in each category, and all votes will be tallied manually and accurately by the hard-working team at Wampum. (and don’t be tempted to cheat—they know what they are doing.)
Now the point of this award isn’t for everyone who reads a high-traffic blog to stampede over there and vote automatically for said high-traffic blog—it’s to expose the range of talent out there in the liberal blogosphere. So even if you are certain you want to vote for Pharyngula, like because you’re married to the guy (hint, hint, Mary) or gave birth to him (Hi, Mom!), you should feel obligated to also check out the competition. Click around at least some of those links at Wampum before casting your vote. I promise I won’t get mad if you decide to vote for someone else.
Dr Free-Ride has a list of the science-relevant worthy competition. I could mention all the other great blogs and articles listed over there, but the quality of the competition depresses me. I’ll just list the Pharyngula nominations (but don’t forget to look over all the others!):
Best Blog (non-professional): Hah, yeah, right. I think Pharyngula may have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, too.
Best Expert Blog: Oh, I’ve been here before. Expect Juan Cole and Informed Comment to kick my butt again, unless some of the other great nominees decide to turn it into a tag-team butt-kicking.
Best Single Issue Blog: and the issue is ME.
Best Post: I’ve got three nominations for this category. Name the one post you like best of these (I’m pushing for “The proper reverence…”, myself).
Best Series: My infatuation with the bizarre sexual practices of invertebrates pays off. Vote for “Pharyngula invertebrate sex series” if you like this one, which includes this set of posts:
Most Humorous Post: An awful lot of people did not think this post was funny at all. If it makes it to the finals, expect mass rioting in middle America.
It’s nice to get all those nominations, but we must also have balance. So here, as a counterweight, is some email I got today. It was titled “Probably the Worst Site of All Time”, which is rather impressive, actually.
Your Blog, or whatever it is, is not scientific. It is pure delusion, masking itself as reasoning, and scientific.
The fact that you portray yourself as a “Liberal” simply adds to the unscientific thinking that masks your ideological psuedoscientific nonsense.
Perhaps a good shot of bourbon is all you need, to bring you into reality.
The wonders of the modern “university” are amazing. And since when was ignorance a point of view?
Uh-oh. I bet he’s going to vote for Juan Cole, isn’t he?
Aww, heck. I’m getting a lot of hate mail this morning (weird correlation: any time I criticize Powerline, I get a spike in the angry mail for a week or two afterwards.) Here’s a classic; this one is titled, “Read this azz”.
if you people think that eveything you see in the world was from evaluation then you are the dumbist mother fucker out there. live to complex to just have evolved from a single cell.and if the dna code is wrighten to that animal then you can not get highter life forms from that code wrighen for that animal .i got lots more if you wanna get in to a debat
No, not the debat! I fear the great skills of this typically knowledgeable and literate creationist—I hope he doesn’t hit me with another one from his vast store of deep arguments.
Please explain the theory of evaluation. For the sake of your correspondent, do it in words of one syllable.
I think it has something to do with this post.
And he didn’t need no fancy colledge ejukashun to tell him that, neether.
Your explanation of the theory of evaluation will be taken into consternation during your annual staff evolution.
Just be sure he is persecuted to the full extent of the law.
I never ceased to be amazed at how impossible it is for some people to understand satire, sarcasm, subtlety, hell, even open-ended questions. To the point they publicize these shortcomings!
He did get one thing right. Pharyngula “is pure delusion” ; )
Ha! PZ is afraid to “get in to a debat”! Now I don’t really know what a “debat” is, but I’m pretty sure it’s related to “highter life forms”.
(Excessive self-awareness can be creepy and inhibiting, but zero self-awareness is entertaining as hell!)
And that’s why Chris Clarke gets numerated for “Best Commenter” in the Koufax Awards.
Heh… one would assume this would be a “wrighten” debat.
God… if only there were selective pressures against… THAT.
Funny, because this sounds like a rather personal example of our relation to primates.
Wow, bet you were scared shitless by that one, eh?
And, you know, while I am getting a little more hate mail than usual right now, those are actually fairly representative of the kind of thing I get almost every day.
It might be kind of cathartic to post some of your more absurd hatemails every couple days, just for hilarity value.
Hey, bring on that “lots more,” and let’s see what other frighteningly sophisticated arguments can evolve from a single brain cell!
i got lots more if you wanna get in to a debat
“So who are you?”
“I’m debatman.”
That’s not criticism, it’s poetry!
Read this azz
He’s the e e cummings of the new century. You should publish an anthology.
that was
a manunkind thing
comparing silly word salad
to
e e cummings
yeah, ee cummings could assemble a grammatical sentence if he needed to, and he had no trouble with spelling.
He’s clearly spelling it wrong on purpose to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor, leaving one with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it is he’s banging on about.
OK, I apologise to the memory of ee cummings.
Hey, don’t knock debatting. I had bats in my attic once. But once I called in the exterminator to debat the place everything was okay.
Actually, “dumbist” might be a pretty good description of these folks’ ideology.
OT (but just barely): Tomorrow’s Doonesbury is another dead-on satire on “teach the controversy.” (No links — our dead-tree newspaper delivers the comics a day early — but it’s a sure bet that PZ is going to want to throw up a link tomorrow.)
“dna code is wrighten to that animal then you can not get highter life forms from that code wrighen for that animal .i got lots more if you wanna get in to a debat”
This guy’s a living, breathing transitional form.
If you call that living.
yeah, Ron, but in transition to what? (scary thought…)
I think he’s already gotten hit by debat. Wrighten in the noggin. More than once. Hey, brain damage is as good an explanation as any.
Hey, not ee cummings, but as a former creative writing teacher, I give MissPrism an “A” for her “found poetry.”
These posts reminded me of something humorous I came across two months ago, on Amazon here, and participated in. I think my source was on Scienceblogs. With each iteration of these reviews, the challenge to ingenuity and humor grows.
Sounds like he took debat to dehead.
I think you have this blog’s single issue: it’s clearly “evaluation.”
Love that hate mail!
I don’t know why, but as my brain kicked into high gear parsing out all of the spelling and gramatical errors – I suddenly had a flashback to the scene in Foul Play with the two little old ladies playing dirty word scrabble arguing over whether mother fucker was one word or two… guess I was just looking to increase the idiot’s total error count.
It’s FID: Fundamentalism Induced Dyslexia.
Good grief, I almost pissed my pants laughing in my desk over the post from that most literate person. I thought for a moment maybe you dipped into humor and made that up for laughs, but then I realized no way Dr. Myers would do that (would he?). Which then made the post all the more funny, that there is actually someone out there with the “debat” skills of a dingbat. Look out Professor Myers, you may have met your nemesis. *Is still laughing* Best, and keep on blogging.
Hey PZ, you got some great nominations there. I’m going to vote for you even over voting for myself. I got six nominations. The Count says I should vote for myself, but that seems so crass. Oh, Hell, I’ll probably vote for both of us. I’m not above a little self-promotion.
Look on the bright side, PZ. If you’re getting mail like that, you must be doing something right.
MissPrism, I was on the same page, but my choice was: “Ford, there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”
I apologize to the memory of Shakespeare (and Adams.)
You do get some outstandingly illiterate hate-mail, PZ. It’s not even obligatory for fundamentalists to be illiterate. Meanwhile, despite the accusation that scientists (evolutionists?) don’t communicate well, I think you’d be hard put to find one that bad.