Primal Sneeze

The sun is in Uranus or somewhere like that, the moon is out at night because it can and the first snows of winter have fallen, 1cm deep in places, bringing the country to a standstill. We are fast approaching the feast day of St. Brigid, patron saint of wide open spaces, large garments and arts & crafts. Other than that it is January, this all means it is time to make your nominations for the Irish Blog Awards.

But act fast! The deadline is … I don’t know, sometime. No one knows. So maybe don’t act fast. Think long and hard about your selections. Remember lives are at stake here. Egos and Ids can be shattered. Super-egos too*. Despite the pleas of the Irish Dental Association teeth will be gnashed and not only Black Tie will be renting garments. Make an error of judgement and children, even babies, will be wrenched from their mothers’ arms and thrown to small, but very hungry, fluffy house pets. All this and worse could have happened last year when Sweary was passed over were it not for the timely intervention of some peace-loving associates of a well known construction and refuse magnate.

Then again, we don’t know when the deadline is, so maybe we should think hard and fast to be on the safe side. One thing we can be sure of, is that by the time the bloggers of Ireland meet, sometime in February and somewhere in Dublin, the judges, whoever they are, will have laboured diligently over their decisions. Right, okay, so that’s not a lot to be sure of but it’s enough to be getting on with for now.

If you’ve been putting the bits together correctly thus far you’ve probably figured out that 00000001+00000001=00000010 and that I just don’t like awards of any kind. Previous experience may be to blame. So no nominations for Sneezy please. You will only be wasting them. I’m sick the night of the do anyway so I won’t be there. But most folk love this kind of thing so being all altruistic and stuff let me make some suggestions to guide you which you can then completely ignore and go do your own thing.

Arts and Culture: What the fek is that about? Ditto for Crafts – unless St. Brigid has a blog.

Sport and Recreation: Get out and do it – Don’t write about it. Isn’t that the whole idea behind sport? The same goes for Food and Drink. Now if there was a Recreation and Drink category the choice would be endless.

News and Current Affairs: We all cover these in some form or another. Mzungu Chick is covering events as they happen in Nairobi better than many journalists but with Gay Byrne not hosting the Late Late Show or Rose of Tralee any more there’s no way we can pass her off as Irish. And MacDara fills us in on happenings in the Leb – sometimes bombs, but mostly booze. Flirty is pretty hot on the affairs bit though.

Popculture: I genuinely don’t know what this means. Is it the Bebo category? Or is it when FMC keeps us in the loop about Britney?

Music: I have to admit I don’t read music blogs. Or is that listen to? I’m not one of the I-follow-bands-that-haven’t-even-been-formed-yet brigade.

Business: Nope. Never even glanced at a single one. Sorry.

Tech: I read Moxy loads of them. More than you could shake a memory stick at. But don’t have a favourite. Sorry again.

Photo: Now it starts to get tough. MacKozer always has brilliant work on his main blog. Even more on his photoblog. Annie treats us to great work too. Does her Flickr stuff count? Whether it does or not it is worth checking out. That’s an order. Right!

Group: This has to be Shite Drivers. Isn’t the whole idea of Web 2.0 that a bunch of people who don’t know each other in real life come together to share information? It’s a well run site and has been favourably covered many times by the mainstream media (except by Ray D’Arcy but he’s a thick bollix so he doesn’t count). If they are listening it must be doing something right.

Irish Language: I love the way Rosie slips it in now and again – discretely, like a married man having an affair. Just enough to keep it interesting but without rising suspicion. No, I don’t know what I meant by that either. But I may go for An Cainteoir Dóchais, or Micilín Mac Měchúra, as he’s taken to calling himself. For the purists he even provides a version in old Irish script. Not only that, but even the images he uses are named in Irish, as are the alt tags.

Newcomer: There were quite a few this year. Gayé, once she reduced her 1,453,872 blogs down to 1, settled in nicely on Gaudium de Gaea to write in English rather than one of her 392 other tongues. Caro took up the ball and ran with it in February. I especially enjoyed reading her flat sharing stories. Not that I normally enjoy wetting myself. But I’m drifting towards Rosie for this. Once started, she embraced blogging wholeheartedly. She jumped right in there with fervour and passion. She went at it like a pig at a potato. But a nice pig. Babe. And a nice potato. Baked – and with glorious toppings.

Best Dressed: Very few of us actually design our own blogs. Most take a template off the shelf and don’t even try personalise it. I have to go for Eolaí here for his work forging Irish KC in the dungeons of Towers gan Fhéile. Hand crafted images that alter subtly over time. Sometimes not so subtly. Despite being as packed as the 05:30 bus out of New Delhi, everything is easily found – navigation is a disaster on many blogs with less than 1% of Eolaí’s content. But what category do I nominate his American Hell in? Ideas anyone.

Specialist: Myself and the Big Shopping Centre were going to nominate Rate This Toilet. Oh, yes we were, haigh. The runs of puns (see there’s one already) would be hard to resist. Okay, we’d be just taking the piss (another one). Butt (fek this, when will it stop?) Medbh might fit the bill being a specialist in three fields – literature, film and women’s rights. I could put her down as a specialist in books and films about women’s rights couldn’t I? I might to go for Paddy Anglican instead. I’ve never been a fan of the God-squad as Stephen well knows but I can’t help checking in for the latest in zanny religious merchandise/kitsch he’s found on the web. I loved the way he used Fairy Tale of New York in his Christmas sermon. He could have won the News and Current Affairs section hands down by breaking the story that Barack Obama’s ancestors came from Moneygall had the press not embargoed him.

Personal: So many to choose from. So little time. So much time. See, we still don’t know the deadline. Fek it. Flirty it is. And shur why not. Everything on her blog is personal. Normally being me-deep in conversation can be a turn off but Flirty makes it work. In fact we want her to be me-deep. We crave it. That’s why we read her blog. It’s a voyeur’s paradise. Yeah, definitely Flirty.

Political: Bock. Bock. Bock. Bock. And Bock. He is the mutt’s marbles when it comes to ripping the establishment to shreds. And not just the Irish one – he’ll go after any wrong doing anywhere in the world. No one is safe. I know for a fact Putin and Bush hold weekly conference calls to discuss him. I read it in a magazine, an expensive one so it must be true. You’ll find plenty of examples in his own Bock’s Office Hits.

Most Humorous Post: For the love of jayzez, why do they do this to us? How are we supposed to decide between all the gems throughout the year from Sweary, Kav (don’t forget them – they were blogging in ‘07), Eolaí, Conorín, Grandad and Grannymar to name but a tiny few. (Those are links to posts not blogs by the way). And every bloody thing from Old Knudsen. I’m going to go for FMC’s story of the day she was actually pleasant to her mother only to realise later that … well, go read it if you haven’t already.

Best Blog Post: I am being unfair here in that I this one picked out way back in August – Ann’s narrative of taking a walk and more interestingly, a talk, with her dog, Toby. This drew me in the way I was drawn in by stories read to me as a child. And like all those stories there was a message. Not a moral in this case, but one about the stupidity of some of the laws that have been forced upon us. Maybe it was a moral after all. You decide.

Best Blog: Again I had my mind made up about this even before last year’s awards. Annie. Better still, as she’s now living in Dublin we don’t need to use the granny-rule, or in her case, the mammy-rule, to qualify her as we did last year.

Worst Everything Blog: What you mean this isn’t a category? It should be. I’d have to give it to Áine Brady. She’s one of them – a politician. One of those politicians who embraced the web and social media pre-election. Oh, and how she embraced it – 4 miserable posts over a period of one month. The last being the miserablist of miserable misery: “Is the web fuelling a crisis in politics?” And that was it. Never heard from since. She didn’t need the blog again – she had been elected.

Foreign Blogs Read by Irish Bloggers: I know, I know, this doesn’t exist either. But how can I go without mentioning some of my favourites? Sam. Yep, the crème de la crème. That means the cream of the cream in foreignish and while the food scientists say it’s not possible to manufacture Sam is blogging proof they are wrong. Memsahib and Muzunga – my African blog-chums. Ablums? The latter I’ve mentioned already. The former I’ve long since forgiven for getting my gender wrong. That’s the Internet for ya – you just can’t reach out like Mr. C. Dundee and check. Not that she would. I think. And Stwidgie who could easily win both best use of Irish and photoblog in one fell swoop. Or Sugar who was in Ireland once but the plane took off again before she could kiss the ground.

Now this last one is going to rock the boat a little so hold on. Listen up and pay attention.

Blog by a Journalist: Lina Žigelytė’s Emigration etc. Lina works in an off-license. So she’s not a journalist, you say. Of course she is. Journalism is her profession. That makes her a journalist. Just because she can’t get a job in her chosen field in Ireland doesn’t make her any less a journalist. It says something about the Irish media though that they’d pass over an excellent writer who could bring so much perspective with her flawless English, vast knowledge, wit and good humour. Funny that Irish employers always use poor language skills as an excuse to keep immigrants in low paid menial jobs. What’s their excuse here?

I’ll leave you with that thought. Time for me to go hoover the fridge. Dog hair is a curse.

*Freud, Sigmund (1923) and not what you were thinking.

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