Awards Season, Part 1

I noticed a day or two ago that Livius over at Riding the High Country nominated me for a pair of awards, a "Blog of the Year" award and a "Versatile Blogger" award. The rules say that winners are supposed to write a blog post about it, but I wasn't certain whether Livius had actually named me a winner per the rules of the contest. Looking through my Gmail account, though, it seems he did in fact notify me, so I get to write an oh-so-exciting post about the awards. I don't know whether I should react like Sally Field when she won her second Oscar for Places in the Heart (the "You like me, you really like me!") comment, or Jane Wyman upon winning for Johnny Belinda (which is coming up tomorrow evening at 6:00 PM on TCM), who commented that she won the Oscar for not saying a word, so she should just shut up and accept her award. The "Blog of the Year" post will be coming up separately later today, since the "Versatile Blogger" post is getting a bit long.

Anyhow, the rules for the "Versatile Blogger" award are aw follows:

Versatile Blogger

Display the award certificate on your website.
Announce your win with a post and include a link to whoever presented your award.
Present 15 awards to deserving bloggers.
Create a post linking to them and drop them a comment to tip them off.
Post 7 interesting facts about yourself.

I think the "15 awards to deserving bloggers" is going to be a bit of a challenge. The problem, of course, is that doing so will quickly turn into a chain letter/pyramid scheme thing, where the right move is really to pass it on to the people above you on the list, otherwise, you're going to run out of people to award. There are a few blogs I'd like to mention without actually awarding and obligating them to write a post about, though.

, a blog that I first noticed when Livius linked to the post on the title sequence of Experiment in Terror, a movie that I think is both visually and aurally interesting and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Obviously, I can't give Michael an award since he's already got one!

Cinematic Paradox. Stevee Taylor is a high school student in New Zealand whom I first learned about back in November thanks to a report from Radio New Zealand. I prefer classic movies and her blog tends to discuss much more recent stuff, but she's still quite a capable blogger who deserves a mention.

I'm also supposed to mention seven "interesting" facts about myself. I'm not the most interesting person, but here goes, in no particular order and the first things that came to my mind:

1. I live next to 1000 acres of state forest, quite literally. New York State has two big preserves, the Adirondack Park Preserve and the Catskill Park Preserve, within which they own a fair amount of the forested land. My driveway is set in from the road, with the property bordering state land. In fact, just yesterday I had 20 wild turkeys in my driveway, watching them from the front window.

2. I was an avid listener of short-wave radio from back in the days when the international broadcasters still used that medium, if they even still have English-language programs. Most of the content has migrated to the internet, however. However, I still have a lot of promotional stuff. I'll see if I can find my Radio Prague sponge and post a photo of it.

3. My first real drinking experience was on board an overnight train in Latvia. I was a Russian major in college, and spent a study abroad semester in 1992 in Sankt-Peterburg. One weekend, we took the overnight train to Riga, Latvia, and on the train back I had my first shot of vodka, from a bottle called "Russkaya Vodka" (yes, that was literally the brand name). The only thing the other students had as a chaser was Pepsi, and I don't like carbonated beverages, so I wound up chasing it with Latvian sausage!

4. Я еще знаю русский язык, но к сожалению у меня нет так много шансов говорить по-русский. (I can still speak the language more or less, but don't have many opportunities to do so.)

5. Russian is my third language; German is my second. My grandfather emigrated from Germany, and I still have a ton of relatives in the Passau area. I should mention the movie The Nasty Girl, which is based on a true story of a young woman who for a school projected investigated the history of her town (Passau) during the war, and found a lot of stuff that angered the city fathers.

6. I'm an avid player of the Oriental board game Go, and the western board game Scrabble, and play both online at servers dedicated to the games, although I'm not particularly good at either. (I don't do "Words With Friends" on Facebook; in fact, I don't care about racking up a high number of Facebook non-enemies at all.)

7. I'm a bit of a minimalist. I drink my coffee black with no sugar and couldn't be bothered to spend big bucks on Starbucks coffee or the similar brands. I don't mind a somewhat more drab blog design if that means it's not full of stuff that will hog the computer's memory and eat up bandwidth. That'a a big part of the reason why I have a plain gray background for this blog.