Hellooooo. Is anyone there? Is anyone here? Anything happen while I was out?
If nothing else, Blawg Review has continued to happen week after week and, it being what we in the trade often refer to as the End of Another Year, the Anonymous Editor of Blawg Review has taken the occasion of Blawg Review #192 to solicit the votes of Blawg Review hosts past, present, and future, for the 2008 Blawg Review of the Year. Having hosted Blawg Review editions here and elsewhere in each of the past three years, and having lined up to do so yet again in a very few months, I now rise to cast my ballot.
Ed.'s invitational post provides a convenient gateway to each of this year's 51 editions, and I have been duly diligent in visiting or revisiting them all prior to making my selection. Especially impressive this year? The array of International sites -- by which we UnitedStatesers ("Americans" isn't strictly the right term, given that there are at least two continents with "America" in their names and that we share the Northern one with another nation state or two) mean blawgs not originating in the United States of [Northern] America -- hosting Blawg Review, and the equally grand array of Recidivist Blawg Review Hosts who, undaunted by their direct knowledge and personal experience of the daunting task it is to be a Blawg Review Host even once, have returned to the hosting fray with more vigor than ever.
All have won, and all should have prizes, and readers, but I have imposed on myself an altogether arbitrary limit of five nominees. Those nominees are, in chronological order:
- cearta.ie >> Blawg Review #164 -- To stand as representative for all of the eminent International law sites that hosted Blawg Review this year, I nominate this Dublin-based Bloomsday edition. A congenial legal stroll with Leo and Steve and the merry denizens of Nighttown. Yes I say yes.
- E-Commerce Law: Blawg Review #167 -- In a post-US Independence Day edition, Jonathan Frieden waved the flag a bit in presenting the "50 Stars of the Blawgosphere," a loose-limbed ramble through These 50 United States, in the order of their admission to the Union, with a legal weblog associated, at least loosely, with each.
- Blawg Review #171 : The IP ADR Blog -- Eminent Victorians? It's been done. Eminent Viriginians? Also done. Eminent Virgins?!? For that, we must thank whatever possessed Victoria Pynchon to build her latest Blawg Review 'pon that theme. Pure as the driven snow. (Have you ever seen snow that's been driven on?)
- Preaching to the Perverted -- Blawg Review #182 -- A multiple choice edition calculated to restimulate happy nightmares in each of us who who ever sat for the Bar Exam.
- The UCL Practitioner: Blawg Review #183 -- There's no place like home, so my final nominee is this comprehensive catalog of clever Californians. I'm certain Decs&Excs would have been included here, had it only been awake and alive at the time. That'll learn me.
Decs&Excs will be hosting Blawg Review for a fourth time at the end of March, on a theme no doubt to be selected in a hasty frenzy at the last possible moment. In the meantime, it is high time that I should end my unbloggerlike hibernation and return to at least quasi-regular posting on this site. Any number of insurance-related weblogs seem to have grown unusually quiet these past months, their disappearances as mysterious as those of the dinosaurs or Judge Crater. Enough. Let the resurgence begin here!
Here's wishing each and all a spirited, comfortable and prosperous 2009.
Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues -- or perhaps to host one yourself. Blawg on.
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Illustration: The Olympic Gateway at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, created for the 1984 Olympic games by the late Robert Graham. Photograph by Flickr! user grifray, used under Creative Commons License.
