Original photo credit: The Windgrove Center, Tasmania, AU.

In celebration of the 100th post, part four in a ten-part series.

In what I hope will be one of the last direct references to the virtual roller derby that was the Weblog Awards, below are, near as I can figure,

Ten contingents to whom I owe thanks for helping LesbianDad become the little hairy-legged blog that could.

Many in these contingents are already among the herds upon herds of old, established readers who comb the site daily for life-sustaining content! content! content! But a good smattering looked in for the first time this past week. Howdy!

1. Personal family and friendship networks; also their friends, and their friends, and their friends. Some are Very Important People &/or veteran organizers, with bodacious email lists and much enthusiasm for supporting a friend and a worthy cause.

2. The very large, very active community of online lesbian family bloggers & readers thereof, primarily connected to one another via Mombian and LesbianFamily.org. Also their friends, and their friends, and their friends. This bunch of folks has a very powerful motivation to increase awareness and understanding about lesbian families, believe strongly in the benefits of some of that work happening online, and therefore would have been immensely motivated to vote daily and to continue to tell their friends to do so.

3. Hundreds of Northern California LGBT families, via the Our Family Coalition email list. Also their friends, and their friends, and their friends. For motivation see rationale #2 above.

3a. [Later note!] The six-hundred-plus subscribers to the Yahoo! group of which I’m a member, made up of “professional women writers from around the world” who “discuss the vocation and the craft.”

4. Untold quantities of San Francisco Bay Area lesbians on a legendary regional email list serve. For motivation see rationale #2 above.

5. Sundry Democratic Underground readers, via a note there by an Our Family Coalition member. For motivation see some of rationale #2 above; add to this also general-purpose hetero ally ire at homophobic hate speech from some quarters of the competition.

6. The mighty Unitarian Universalists and their vast national email network. Or at least the mighty emailing fingers of the Northern California and Michigan people. I spoke at a service at the Oakland UU once in June, and have friends who are very active in the congregation. Many (a) read this blog religiously (pun intended, I suppose), happily supportive of its essential message, and some also (b) got hecka steamed over the homophobic hate speech.

7. One or two actual random people who might have simply run across the blog for the first time when seeing it listed as a finalist, and who voted for it for any number of reasons. (e.g., Thought it was actually about Russian trends after misreading the title as “Caspian Fad.”)

8. One little dickens who figured out some way to scam the Diebolds at Weblog Awards Central, evidently to the tune of about a hundred votes, the sneak*. Except they got sucked back up into the ether where they came from by the Weblog Awards Quality Assurance vacuum. Which is exactly where they belong. *[Later note, after netting some insider info from Weblog Awards central: There were three sneaks! From three different parts of the country (none local)! To the tune of hundreds of votes! Yow! Fortunately the WAQA vacuum is powerful!]

9. My doctor and the intern who was with him when I got a check up last week. Well, I don’t really know for sure whether my doc voted. I just asked him and he said he would, and he’s such a nice, friendly man. Don’t know about the intern, though. I kinda think he was just kissing up to me to look good in front of the doctor.

10. A handful of other bloggers who recommended folks vote for LD, like The Other Mother, Mombian, Looky, Daddy, politickybitch, TiFaux, the buddha is my dj, A Life Less Convenient and even (what a prince), on the last day, thinking it was a squeaker between this and another blog, fellow “Best New Blog” category finalist Konagod. The Five-Forty ought to snag some kind of commendation for “Best Sense of Humor” or “Best Sport.” Plus while we’re at it there was this nice gal on MySpace. Oh! And (as I later discover), folks at Daily Kos.

Thank you all. Except you, #8, you naughty cheaters.

By the way, not a factor: The Lesbian Mafia. There is none; never has been. A vicious rumor. If there were a Lesbian Mafia you know they’d be the first I’d have called, and the one guy that seems to be running this whole operation at Weblog Awards Central would still be struggling right now, wrists tied behind his back in a broom closet somewhere, duck tape over his mouth, an iPod plugged into his ears with Indigo Girls on an endless loop.

Also not a factor: My dad. Not that he didn’t try. But he’s 85 years old for cryin’ out loud. He is still upset by the fact that you can’t get a phone to work by simply picking it up when it rings and setting it down on the receiver when you’re done. (So am I.) But it took me over 20 minutes to talk him through voting just once in the computer room at his retirement home. (“Okay, now it says Google again in big letters” etc.).

Another night he tried again on his own, and left a phone message: “Um…. honey… Trying to vote here…. “ His voice trails off. Then he’s back on again. “Oh! There’s the baby!”, referring to the image at the top o’ the blog header. That came out in the delivery style of the old Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon (”Heeeere’s Johnny!”) Then he fell quiet again, there was some rustling, a voice in the distance. “Um… okay. Ooops. I’ll call you back.”

Thanks for everything, though, Pops. It’s not the quantity of votes that count; it’s the quality.

[Fifth list of ten: How to build a better weblog award competition]