{"id":6908,"date":"2010-03-01T14:44:23","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T19:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=6908"},"modified":"2010-03-01T14:44:23","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T19:44:23","slug":"awards-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/awards-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Awards Season"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Golden Globes: ha!<\/p>\n<p>Tonys, Academy Awards: don&#8217;t make me laugh!<\/p>\n<p>The People&#8217;s Choice: huh? wasn&#8217;t that a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Cooper and a talking Basset hound named Cleo?<\/p>\n<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; padding: 0.5em; margin-left: 30px; margin-bottom: 1.25em; width: 427px; background-color: #ffffcc;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Hint: yes.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/9tKgbiog5q4&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>You can have all of them. Roz Morris, of the imperatively named <em>Nail Your Novel<\/em> blog, <a title=\"Roz Morris\/Nail Your Novel: 'Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me'\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dirtywhitecandy.com\/archives\/633\" target=\"_blank\">has offered<\/a> <em>Running After My Hat<\/em> not one but two awards. I accept them happily, on the blog&#8217;s behalf. (It couldn&#8217;t be here tonight itself.) Here are the trophies:<\/p>\n<table cellspacing=\"1\" cellpadding=\"3\" align=\"center\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Sunshine Award\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/copySunshine_Award_jpgTish.jpg?resize=172%2C168&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"172\" height=\"168\" \/><\/td>\n<td><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"Sugar Doll Award\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/copysugar_doll_award_pngTheresa.png?resize=132%2C168&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"132\" height=\"168\" \/><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Spiffy, eh?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, with great rewards come great responsibilities. And because this actually combines two awards into one, it comes with a double <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">burden<\/span> treat:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>pass the Sunshine Award on to 12 other deserving folks; and<\/li>\n<li>for the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award, tell your readers 10 interesting things about myself.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I&#8217;ll follow Roz&#8217;s lead and hook the two awards together. My Sunshine-Award notes will follow my ten-interesting-things list, with the caveat that one man&#8217;s interesting is another woman&#8217;s bemusing (a caveat particularly useful in our household).<\/p>\n<p>In no particular order:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>I&#8217;ve had a cinnamon-raisin bagel and a cup of tea for breakfast nearly every weekday and Saturday morning for the last 30(ish) years. On Sundays, I have a glass of orange juice first.<\/li>\n<li>When I was a kid, I watched every single episode of two TV shows &#8212; <em>Laugh-In<\/em> and <em>I Spy<\/em> &#8212; when it was first broadcast, and never since. To this day, I wish I were as funny and insightful as Lily Tomlin and looked as cool in jeans as Robert Culp and Bill Cosby.<\/li>\n<li>The only two times I&#8217;ve passed out, or believe I did, sharp bladed objects were in the immediate vicinity:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"margin-left: 30px;\"> The first time happened when I was in college. I&#8217;d just gone about 24 hours without sleep, after an all-night round-trip drive from New Jersey to West Virginia to pick up the older of my two sisters, who was away at college and wanted to pay our parents a surprise visit. The next morning, I was standing in front of the mirror, shaving&#8230; and then I wasn&#8217;t: I was looking up at the underside of the sink.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-left: 30px;\">The second time, I was living by myself in a small apartment out in the country. I had a wedge of orange cheddar cheese on the counter, which I was slicing <em>very thin<\/em>, and suddenly noticed that the red wax which encased the cheese was mottling the orange of the cheese itself. It wasn&#8217;t red wax, of course. When I stood up after the emergency-room repair and bandage, the nurse took one look at me and said <em>Quick, lie back down on the examini&#8212;!<\/em> I complied, all right: <em>whomp<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ol start=\"4\">\n<li>I <em>loooooove<\/em> playing practical jokes. Too much, in fact. I have pretty much sworn off the really elaborate ones, but still get an inordinate kick out of kidding someone while wearing a straight face, and having them fall for it. (Especially if I hear that they&#8217;ve attempted to share the bogus information with someone else.)<\/li>\n<li>The Missus teases me for believing my hair to be still brown. Some years ago, we were meeting a friend at some downtown nighttime festival, but we couldn&#8217;t decide on an exact location to meet up. (It&#8217;s always a mob scene.) She &#8212; the friend &#8212; told us that was okay: she&#8217;d be on the lookout for &#8220;John&#8217;s silvery hair.&#8221; You could have heard my jaw hitting the table from a block away. Silvery? <em>Silvery<\/em>? <strong>Me?!?<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>I latch onto words in my writing and then beat the hell out of them with overuse. A constant struggle. (Various forms of &#8220;bemuse,&#8221; such as earlier in this post: that&#8217;s one of them. Bemusement, as you can imagine, being pretty much a permanent state of affairs in my vicinity.)<\/li>\n<li>I auditioned as an extra in the Richard Gere\/Jodie Foster movie <a title=\"IMDB: 'Sommersby'\" href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0108185\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Sommersby<\/em><\/a>, for which some scenes were being filmed in Virginia (where I lived then). They probably needed a hundred extras, and over the course of two days a couple thousand must have shown up. I didn&#8217;t hear anything back from them, of course, so went about making plans for a weekend trip to New Jersey. The night before I was to leave, behold: I got The Call. Ever after, I have not been able to believe I said no: &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry, I&#8217;m already packed for a trip.&#8221; (Leaving unsaid: <em>&#8230;to do the same sorts of things I&#8217;ve done in New Jersey for my entire life<\/em>.) The odds of my even meeting her, of course, were vanishingly small, but I will probably go to my grave thinking of Jodie Foster as a missed chance in life.<\/li>\n<li>I hoard greeting cards.<\/li>\n<li>Although I&#8217;ve been a computer and Internet professional for over 30 years, I&#8217;m in many ways a closet Luddite. (It took me a loooong time to get used to writing drafts of fiction with anything but a #2 pencil, on notebook paper.)<\/li>\n<li>The Missus and I met online in 1991, on the old pre-AOL, pre-Web <a title=\"Wikipedia, on CompuServe\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/CompuServe\" target=\"_blank\">CompuServe<\/a> system (TAPCIS, anyone?); I lived in Virginia then, and she, in Florida. I also had accounts on many other online services at the time, and was one of the original subscribers of America OnLine. When The Missus-to-Be also joined AOL, we used to play this multi-player game called Neverwinter Nights, far into the night. Our online usage bills &#8212; metered by the minute &#8212; were astounding.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Okay, now for the fun part: passing along the glory to 12 other blogs&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In January, <a title=\"Earlier RAMH post: 'Gracias'\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/gracias\/\" target=\"_blank\">I listed numerous blogs<\/a> which I visit regularly and which continue to slay me with their consistently high quality (even those where the posting is less than consistent ;)). There were <em>thirty<\/em> blogs named there, though, and while they should all feel free to accept both these awards, at least implicitly <span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>[hint, hint: I&#8217;d <\/em>LOVE <em>to see your ten-things-about-me lists!]<\/em><\/span>, naming them all again seems to push the award guidelines a little too far. So let&#8217;s do it this way:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Consider: not all the blogs I named back then can really fit something like this into their format or structure. For instance, the blogs of publishing-industry professionals can&#8217;t possibly accept every award thrown their way, or for that matter to meet all the &#8220;post about X&#8221; requirements. So that immediately trims down the list some.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;<em>N <\/em>interesting things about me&#8221; meme is common in other social-networking fora, like Facebook. If you&#8217;ve already done it there, why do it again on your blog, right? <span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>[hint, hint: not everyone who reads this post will be on Facebook etc.]<\/em><\/span><\/li>\n<li>You just may never want or get around to blogging about this.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So let&#8217;s leave it at that: if, per the Sugar Doll Award criterion, you <em>do<\/em> blog about your ten-interesting-things, and\/or you <em>do<\/em> name twelve other blogs worthy of the Sunshine Award, feel free to grab the corresponding badge(s). And by all means drop a comment here in either case: <em>I&#8217;ll<\/em> know that you&#8217;ve done so (because I read you folks every day), but other visitors here may not!<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px;\"><em><strong>Note:<\/strong><\/em> Not listed in January, because I didn&#8217;t even know of it then, was Roz&#8217;s <em>Nail Your Novel<\/em> blog itself. Please don&#8217;t let my crime of ignorance be yours, though &#8212; not if (as I am) you&#8217;re a writer who always feels eager for help and intelligent discourse. Certainly, while you&#8217;re there, avail yourself of her <a title=\"Roz Morris: 'Nail Your Novel' e-book\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dirtywhitecandy.com\/archives\/486\" target=\"_blank\">free <em>Nail Your Novel<\/em> e-book offer<\/a>! (It&#8217;s a 1.9MB PDF.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Golden Globes: ha! Tonys, Academy Awards: don&#8217;t make me laugh! The People&#8217;s Choice: huh? wasn&#8217;t that a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Cooper and a talking Basset hound named Cleo? Hint: yes. You can have all of them. Roz Morris, of the imperatively named Nail Your Novel blog, has offered Running After My Hat not one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,94,37,5],"tags":[1658,1659,1660,1661,1662],"class_list":{"0":"post-6908","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","7":"category-02_in-the-news","8":"category-onlineworld","9":"category-06_writing","10":"tag-awards","11":"tag-sunshine-award","12":"tag-nail-your-novel","13":"tag-roz-morris","14":"tag-fabulous-sugar-doll-blogger-award","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1Nq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6908"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6938,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908\/revisions\/6938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}