The Lovely Blog Award

For the past week or so you may have seen the Lovely Blog Award logo here on my blog. My friend Ami Hendrickson awarded it to me last week. Someone awarded it to her and in researching it, she came up with a variety of ways this award is supposed to be granted, but could not locate the origin of the award itself. According to Ami, when you get this award, you are supposed to:

1.) Post it on your blog and include the name of the person (and a link to his or her blog) who bestowed it upon you.

2.) Pass the award on to 15 other blogs you have recently enjoyed. [This one changes, depending upon the blog you check. Some say "10 other blogs." Some say "another blog." It's a sort of chain-letter approach to alerting the world to blogs you like.]

3.) Contact the awarded bloggers and let them know that you have awarded their work.

So with this in mind, I am hereby bestowing The Lovely Blog Award to several blogs I read regularly. There really aren’t that many, as I don’t have time to read a lot of blogs. I’ll read a post here and there, and if I see an interesting link I’ll click it, but there are very few blogs I read every day (and even fewer that warrant an RSS feed at the top of my browser where they have to vie for space with Monster, CareerBuilder, MIJobs and others).

I like a blog that tells me something new – news and analysis (like you get on Feministing, Jezebel, and Pharyngula), information that is helpful to my daily life, (like you get on Consumerist and Daily Writing Tips), or posts that are just plain fun to read (like on Awful Library Books).

As Ami pointed out, many of these people or organizations probably don’t even know that I read or follow their blogs. Some (ok, likely all of them) probably won’t care that I’m giving them an award of any kind, but I’m a stickler for following directions, (most of the time), so here goes. Some blogs I love, in alphabetical order just to be objective about things:

1. Awful Library Books: “This site is a collection of public library holdings that we find amusing and maybe questionable for public libraries trying to maintain a current and relevant collection.”
2. Daily Writing Tips: “Every day we’ll send you a grammar, spelling, punctuation or vocabulary tip.”
3. Feminsting: “Young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, influence and connect.”
4. Jezebel: “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for women.” [Although it's a lot more than that and is populated with witty, intelligent women and men.]
5. PZ Myers blog, Pharyngula: “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal. PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.”
6. The Consumerist: “The Consumerist empowers consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day. We are a leading online resource for consumer-driven advice about dealing with everything from non-existent customer service to onerous cell-phone contracts to ever-shrinking (and ever-more-expensive) grocery products.”

You’ll notice that none of my friend’s blogs are listed here. There are two reasons for that – one, Ami already gave them the award (and she already has one herself), so giving it twice would be silly, and two, you can find them listed in the sidebar under Blogs & Sites I Like. Consider them all awarded as well.