Bryan Cranston Rehearses Plans

To relieve Damian Lewis of his Best Actor Emmy.

Winner-take-all award contests in fields where the talent is wildly variegated are, at best, a mixed blessing.

We used to have all kinds of awards for blogging.

We don't anymore.

I'd like to think that this is because we have matured, but the simple truth is, blogging has changed so much in the last several years that it is almost no longer recognizable as that which it once was. Big Box Aggregators with business models and ad-based traffic sweeteners have rolled in their armies. Twitter has narrowed the aperture of many reader's attention span. Facebook swallowed whole continents. The line between the professional and the passionate amateur is now a canyon filled with the charred stumps of burnt bridges. Once promising enterprises have failed and fled. 

And like duck and cover drills or Blogroll Amnesty Day

the act of celebrating our best and brightest seems like one more quaint, half-remembered custom of a bygone age. 

In the long run these may be turn out to be good things or bad things, but they are definitely things.

Either way, magnets!