The Stermy Awards for February 2008

You perverse heathens! Have you no pity? This month was the most difficult of all. The Atheosphere was flooded with Exemplary Writing. (That's why all the dinosaurs are dead now.) I couldn't click anywhere without finding myself up to my ass in great prose (and even some poetry). Can anyone honestly make that claim about the Theorealm?

To help me cull at least some of this month's offerings, I decided to add a few new, totally arbitray rules.

• No award to anyone whose name begins with the same letter as Exterminator.
• No recognition for anyone under 21 or over 60 years of age.
• No prize for any blogger who mentions any kinds of primates other than humans.
• No distinction for anyone who doesn't use the word "fuck" at least once in each post.
• No Stermy for anyone who has either earned one before or not earned one before.

Those all felt too damn random, even for me. They hadn't evolved naturally. So ultimately, I just decided to pick the five posts in which I was most impressed by the writing and the ideas. Fuck it! Six posts.

Anyway, here are this month's winners, in the usual alphabetical order:

C.L. Hanson at Letters from a Broad
for come on baby, won't you show some class?
(more on primate sexuality)
Notice that (in this scenario) higher class women benefit from trashing sexually available women. Higher class women (and their offspring) are better off if their mates aren't directing their time and resources towards side dalliances. So privileged women have an incentive to promote the idea that promiscuous women are trashy and not worth one's time.

Evo at Evolutionary Middleman
for Why do Christians hate America?
At this time in our nation's history, we all need to be aware of any persons who demonstrate Un-American tendencies. I’m not sure it’s true that all Christians hate America – but it certainly looks like it.

Infidel753 at Infidel753
for Personhood
I offer here two candidates for the status of person, with all the moral and legal implications which that status carries, including the affirmation that the physical destruction of this entity would constitute murder from a moral and legal standpoint. See if you can guess which of these two the mainstream Christian religion accepts as a person.

Nathan at Very Special Monkeys
for This is our country
This is an all too common misstep in logic from tolerating someone's personal beliefs to tolerating their outward actions based on those beliefs. If you want to believe that your toaster talks to you, fine. That's your business. But if your toaster tells you to blow up a school, or even to steal a candy bar, then it's someone else's business.

Ric at Grumpy Lion
for A Long, Aimless, Pointless, Rambling Post
Nothing is pure anymore. In the morning, while it’s still dark, I walk to Starbucks to get the newspaper, and on my way back across the parking lot I can see a few bright stars, sometimes the moon, and I feel awed and amazed and I wonder at all that bright stuff out there. And then I realize we’re never going to get there because we’ve destroyed our own planet and it will take its revenge, sooner rather than later.

Yinyang at this is you reading about me ... or not
for I wrote this poem just now because it's true
(even though it's not terribly original)
It has to be perfect,
But it won't is perfect.
So, it's better to do nothing
Or put very little effort into it,
Because if it can't be perfect why does it matter?

Once again, I'm going to make my monthly appeal to everyone: Please let me know if you read anything that you think is Stermy-worthy. But, duh! If you see that I've left a comment at a post even before you've read it, there's a pretty good chance that I've been there already. On the other hand, if you happen to read a post that you'd like to see honored in some small way, and you think that I've missed it, by all means bring it to my attention. Thanks.