Sappho Speaks: Best New Blog - The Fix Is In!

What Would Sappho Say?

Lectori Salutem! or L.S. (Greetings to the Reader!)

First. let me just say up front I AM INDEED, a SORE LOSER when the odds don't seem to have been even going in at the Lezzy Awards over at The Lesbian Lifestyle from the get go. I had no huge expectation going in as the winner in the Best New Blog category since I launched at the end of November 2009 giving me hardly three months to collect a following. I have to say it was a shock that I made it into the final three. Once there, however, I came to believe my competition would be other singular blogs as the word in the award is BLOG and that some voters might actually review each if they were not familiar with them before making their pick.

That hope was dashed pretty quickly as my StatCounter did not reveal any undue rise in visitors during the voting week from the very beginning. This was going to be won by the blog with the highest readership, not the best blog, that was crystal clear. I was fine with that as I was the new kid on the block with only a little over 7000 total hits since my blogs inception. I had no clue how many people were visiting this website, it certainly isn't any After Ellen or She Wired, great lesbian websites by the way but a decent site for someone just starting out, trying to get their stuff out there and read. The Lesbian Lifestyle is a forum for bloggers to post their work and get exposure to the lesbian community. It is run hands on and intimately by Kelly Lesczynski as the managing editor with TLL Blog Picks and TLL Advice Panel as well as her own pearls of wisdom as any of ours are.

I just cannot believe my own stupidity in thinking something like this would actually be a contest where things would be compared. My bust, literally. No really. That was just plain asinine on my part to think this would turn out to be anything more than a high school popularity contest but to be beaten by a sleeked-out, all service news and entertainment WEBSITE that added blog(s) a few months ago that are serviced by a team of editors and interns capable of flying them all across the country because the site is not new. Autostraddle, the website, has been around for some time and has a well developed following already. The have five departments of paid staff members and an "army of interns" as they call it who run this great site for lesbians. Without further ado, here is Autostraddle. Great, right? Would be a great candidtate for Best Entertainment/Culture Blog but they lost that one. They never should have qualified for Best New Blog. If you guys want to have a contest for websites with blogs on them why not add a category, Best Lesbian Website Featuring Blogs? Wait, that would put The Lesbian Lifestyle on the chopping block for an award now wouldn't it? The question is, how would they feel up against behemoths like Autostraddle, After Ellen or She Wired? Does TLL think they would win that category and is the answer to that question the reason why a category like that doesn't exist?

Anyway you slice it I know in my heart of hearts the intent of the Best New Blog category is to give a start up a shot at some recognition for a job well done not give some well-oiled machine and easy win over the little guys. They didn't win their category - OVER, DONE.
Call me a sore loser but that is not what this is because I had no thoughts I would ever win given the size of my blog and the length of time I have been at it. I see my statistics every day and am under no delusions but it wasn't ever going to be a real blog, that one. It wasn't going to be some woman like me that worked her ass of to write as many blogs a week as she could to provoke, amuse, enlighten, educate and rant as I am doing now when things just hit me wrong or they smell funny. Well something really stinks and it is the way this category was hijacked by big business with a round of applause by TLL.

I just want to give a shout out to How To Be Butch, the other runner-up as I am sure you would have garnered the second most votes and in my mind that makes you the real winner. JOB WELL DONE!

Much Love.


Inspired By Sappho's Muse

MUSIC OF THE DAY
Seeing as how the tone of this piece has a bit of an edge to it and I come off as the sore loser, just not willing to accept defeat, I may as well play that role to the hilt. Today we will play just one song and it's by the Dixie Chicks. It's the wonderfully unforgetting and hard fought forgiveness from the threesome summed up well in Not Ready To Make Nice and I am obviously not going that "make nice and shut up" route either! So here the are, those brazen hussies.... My heros!

Not Ready To Make Nice     The Dixie Chicks

QUOTES OF THE DAY
All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.
Robert Southey

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton