It has been brought to my attention that those of us out here in the big bad world, far from our homes, braving the scary, dangerous jungle that is living abroad, while blogging our hearts out for those back home, are actually competing with one another to have the Best Expatriate Weblog. Of course no one knows about little old me yet, with my not-yet-one-year-old blog. But the secret to internet blogging popularity is having both high quality and high quantity of content. Just writing a couple thoughts down every day with a picture or two has gotten me up over 90,000 words in total in less than a year.
Over the past couple months, I have befriended and/or been befriended by an American living in Slovenia that goes by the online alias sgazzetti. My regular readers will have noticed his intelligence and sense of humor from his comments here on my humble blog. As you may recall, he has a blog, called Isoglossia, that has quite a sizable readership. Despite me telling him specifically that I've already voted for him, he still emailed me begging for more votes. Because I like the guy, and I'm pretty sure he'd do the same for me, I'm giving him some air time here and asking that you take 10 seconds and 2 clicks to do the guy a favor.
Here's the email he sent me, with the subject, "CALLING ALL INTERNET PEOPLE: shameless self-promotion":
Hi Erik--
I know that you already know this, so if this email looks all prefab it's because I'm trying to make it reasonably forwardable. As you've seen in a recent post, our silly little website, www.isoglossia.com, has been nominated for an honor awarded by A Fistful OF Euros. This is a reasonably widely-read and -respected Eurocentric blog/news site, so we're pretty agog at having been one of only five sites nominated in our category, "Best Expatriate Weblog" -- why yours was overlooked for nomination in the same category is a question which will torment students of justice for ages.
Thanks for your vote. We would be happy to see the prize go to any of the other sites in the running, but of course we'd be happiest of all to see it go to us. The odd thing is that while some categories are attracting large numbers of votes, ours is a relative backwater. This makes it conceivable that we could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat -- we started off dismally last and are currently in a reasonably healthy second place. As it stands now, if just a few dozen additional people cast their votes for us we could edge out the Parisian leader. So anyone you could get to vote for us through word of mouth, cheerleading blog post, or forwarding this email message could make all the difference and save me from having to get all sour-grapesy about the faux glory of What Could Have Been.
Thanks for any help you can send our way. I'll paste in a link for voting below -- we're in the fifth category down.
A Fistful of Euros Third Annual Satin Pajamas Awards -- polls close Friday at 20.00 GMT (or something).
I told you he was clever and funny. He came up with a reasonable excuse for pasting me what he sent to all his other contacts and threw in some hyperbolical, nausea-inducing flattery. "Students of justice" my ass. Nothing like an arbitrary award with some voting to turn someone into a politician, huh?
When I'm nominated in 2009, I expect the same kind of promotion from all of you.
Go do it. It'll only take a second.