Penultimate Place

As the French say, “What a surprise.” We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” currently find ourselves in a dogfight for “Funniest Blog” in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Unfortunately, however, our dog is severely retarded and moribund. Also, for those of you interested in such things, it’s a pug.

You see, dear reader, this humble “weblog” is—for the third straight year—fairing rather poorly in the Weblog Awards. In this particular iteration, in fact, we currently poll in penultimate place. Which, for our vocabulary-challenged readers, is second-to-last.

Now, we suppose we could prattle on about the idiocy of the American public. We guess we could complain that the likely winner of said contest offers nothing but tendentious misreadings of conservative columnists and calls the dubious result humor. And we figure we could mention that the current runner-up is so painfully unfunny that it makes us cringe.

But this, you surely understand, is nothing but spilled milk. Or, as the British would have it, spilt milk. As honest men and ladies, we simply have to own up: We’re getting completely trounced. We’re getting beaten like Ike Turner’s girlfriends. It’s sad, but it’s true.

And, to be downright honest, dear reader, it hurts. Badly, in fact. Actually, if you want to know how it feels, you’ll have to sit firmly on your testicles for a solid hour or two. If you lack testicles, well, then, we’re sorry: You’ll never know how it feels. Unless you own any Phil Collins records.

We mean, come on: Second-to-last place? Man, we know our e-outfit is a bit dilapidated, but we didn’t realize that it’s that bad. Pretty soon, out of shame, we’ll take up Yak farming in Peru, for crying out loud.

So what happened? How did a “weblog” so brimming with promise become an inveterate Weblog Awards loser? Sure, we got nominated for an award a few times. Yet even Pat Morita received a few nominations in his lifetime—and he appeared in The Karate Kid movies, for Christ’s sake.

Now, if we were loyal Nation readers, we might suspect foul play. Perhaps some evil cabal of Jews has rigged the “Funniest Blog” contest in favor of ultra-Zionist “weblogs”?

That doesn’t sound terribly reasonable to us, but such a notion might land us column space in Mother Jones. And, heck: If the Mossad took down the twin towers on 9/11, surely it can steal the rug out from under the crack young staff. Just ask those famed foreign policy experts Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer.

Still, short of compelling us to don a kaffiyeh, this explanation fails to make us feel any better. Yes, yes, yes: We, like countless Muslim nations, are now the victims of an insidious Hebrew plot. But even Yasir “She’s My Baby” Arafat got his hands on the Nobel Peace Prize.

And, if we recall correctly, he was responsible for the deaths of a few thousand people or so. But us? We’ve never harmed a soul.

So, as the 2007 Weblog Awards wind down, we ask you to take this extraordinarily passive-aggressive “post” to heart. Vote for us as often as you can. Perhaps, with your help, we’ll only wind up feeling largely pathetic.