Johnny was robbed.
You should have won, Brian. You have a better grasp of the agony & ecstasy of CF, as evidenced by your phenominal Seven Swans post.
How did you not win this one? There must have been some serious Harris Poll type voting going on for you to have not even gotten runner-up. I demand a recount performed by someone who is not in Florida.
Johnny's award floated away, like a child's red balloon that he accidentally let go of when he stopped tugging at its cord and begged his mom to ride the roller coaster. He thought it was his, but its contents were misunderstood and his treasured prize betrayed him as they silently parted ways. It hung far away and twinkled in the distance like Rachel Tremont's golden hair at that seventh grade dance as she swayed back and forth with Mark Peterson -- close enought to see, but reachable only in a dimension untreadable by these small shoes.
I'm with you on this one, Meeechigan Dan. That "Seven Swans" post may have been the most amazing thing I've read in my entire life. Brian deserved this one.
You're probably right, Jeremy. I guess the right thing to do was to vote for run-on sentences and improper use of hyphens to make trite jokes.
We, of course, think Brian should have won this, too. Or Johnny. Or any of them, actually.
If we're talking trite jokes, though--we've got that on lockdown.
I wasn't being a dick. I love Johnny's writing.
Along with--you know--the improper use of and continuing abuse thereof--well--the hyphens.
We're--well--speechless. Thanks to all.
Love EDSBS, Orson. Read it everyday. Just not for Keith Jackson (circa 1995) qualities.
Hopefully Orson doesn't win for Best Pac Ten Blog, too!
I'm with Ben and Jeremy.
I love Orson's, Brian's, and (most especially) my work, but Johnny is a man among boys . . . and not in that creepy recruiting sort of way.
"Eleven Swans" was one of the great emotional postings of all time, but I remember thinking when I read it that it was so good, it read like something Johnny had written. That kind of emotional power is to be found in any number of Johnny's postings, so much so that the consensus was that you could pick something from Ronald Bellamy's Underachieving All-Stars almost at random and have a "best post" nominee.
I'm proud to have come in second, but I said it before and I'll say it again: I'd rather have gotten Johnny's vote and Johnny's alone than to have won the thing unanimously. On the list of guys I'd like to have think highly of my writing, Johnny is the only one who isn't a dead Southern novelist.
Two hyphens form a de facto em-dash, which is a valid punctuation form and appears to be used almost correctly by Jeremy (less the spaces on either side of his double-hyphen/em-dash).
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/...hive/
091502.htm
Brian, you're the winnah in our hearts, man. tear. congrats to EDSBS, et al too.
AD, thanks for the unnecessary lesson, but you missed the point.
In the actual EDSBS entry there is a double hyphen that is not closed when it should have been. Man. Reading comprehension, ya'll.
By the way, it's "y'all," not "ya'll."
It's a contraction, in which the apostrophe denotes the removal of letters. It's short for "you all," so the apostrophe goes between the "y" and the "a," denoting the removal of the "o" and the "u."
"Ya'll" is the contraction for "ya will."
Just as long as we're being technical, I mean.
Ben, Kyle, Orson, Jeremy, Dave, and to Colin and BK in the above post, praise from you guys is worth a great deal to me. I can only say that I'm humbled at the mere inclusion of my blog with titans such as those which were also nominated.
Kyle,
I was once berated for using the proper contraction for "y'all" because that wasn't "the southern way."
If you're telling me I was right, then I'll change my ways. But I'm going to need that in writing.
Oh, and Kyle, thanks for yet another unnecessary lesson. But somehow your unknowingly pejorative post was palatable.
Maybe because I like pictures of Kristin Davis.
Ben, you were right and I'll get you that in writing.
Trust me . . . I've had to correct native-born, lifelong Southerners on it, too. It's like "'til" . . . you can use a form without an apostrophe ("till"), but, if the apostrophe's going to be there, it needs to be in the right place. (The same goes for Faulkner's Anglophilic punctuation.)
I specialize in unnecessary lessons (as a friend of mine once put it, I am a veritable font of useless information), but I apologize for being pejorative, even unknowingly or palatably.
Johnny, you're the Kwisatz Haderach of weblogging. The Fremen call you "Muad'Dib."
The person who corrected me on "y'all" was an Alabama man. And I'd also receive regular lectures about how there are actually only five southern states in the union (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas and South Carolina).
I learned a lot -- for a yankee. Apparently I'll have to unlearn some of it.
Ben, when you say "corrected" are you sure you don't mean "learned you good"?
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