Congratulations To Us All!

When I first started blogging, there was a plethora of “Blogger Awards”. Over the past 8 years, I personally have been nominated for the Liebster, The Sunshine Blogger, The Mystery Blogger Award, The Golden Bloggerz Award, and several more. Now, this doesn’t make me special—from what I understand, a lot of people got nominated and a lot of those people viewed these awards as bothersome or annoying and that’s because those people probably have LOTS more to write about than me, and I always looked at these nominations (did anyone ever actually WIN an award?) more as a fun way to generate content in a week where maybe nothing funny happened. But lately, there have been no nominations, and it’s either that my content is boring and non-inspiring, or that these awards no longer exist. I follow a LOT of other bloggers and there’s been nary a whisper of an award to be had, although I just did some research and found a blog written by someone who got nominated in September for a Liebster and wrote an ENTIRE post about how much she hates the Liebster award. And it was a loooonnnnngggg post where she actually tagged the person who nominated her, and that person was VERY unhappy in the comments. Next time, just say thanks and move on, lady.

At any rate, considering the dearth of awards lately, I’ve decided to invent my own. It’s called the Fandangly Award, and here’s how it works:

  • You can award it to yourself whenever you don’t have anything else to write about. Like maybe you’re a humour blogger but you’ve had a sh*tty week and you don’t have anything funny to work with. Easy—just award yourself a Fandangly–but you can say it came from me if you’re shy.
  • Ask yourself as many questions as you want and then answer them, either seriously or humorously. Here’s an example: If you were to invent your own reality show, what would it be? Here’s my answer:

The show is called Stick It To Me and in this show, the competitors have to make everything out of popsicle sticks and the host is Alex Trebek and yes, I know he’s dead but he’s still the best at hosting everything.

Alex Trebek: All right, contestants! This week’s challenge was “Iconic Buildings”. Donna, what happened here?
Donna: Well, Alex, I tried to recreate the Eiffel Tower, but as anyone who’s ever participated in a team-building exercise knows, popsicle sticks aren’t stable at great heights, especially when all you have to attach them together is masking tape.
Alex Trebek: That’s a shame. Bob, tell me about your structure.
Bob: I built a scale model of the Globe Theatre.
Alex Trebek: Didn’t the Globe Theatre burn down?
Bob (*lights match ominously*): That’s right, Alex.

  • Encourage other people to award themselves Fandanglies. I want this sh*t to catch on.
  • Press ‘publish’.

And now, in honour of me receiving my first Fandangly (applause and cheers ensue), here are the questions I’ve asked myself and here are the answers:

1) Who is your favourite drag queen and if you were a drag queen, what would your name be?

I have two current favourite drag queens and I’ve met both of them. The first is Kylie Sonique Love, the first transgender woman to win a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I met her at a performance and at the end, I was able to go up to the stage and tell her how much I admired her. She took my hand and thanked me. It was awesome. The second is a British drag queen named Lady Camden. Ken and I did a meet and greet and she was there. I got to stand next to her and holy sh*t, she’s tall and gorgeous. And she’s also kind and lovely to talk to. If I was a drag queen, my drag name would be Mabel Syrup, because I’m Canadian. You can tell I’ve given this some thought.

Me and Kylie Sonique Love

2) Which customer at work creeps you out the most?

The middle-aged man who buys a certain type of doll designed for teenaged girls. He is so obsessed that the owners have him on speed dial and if a new doll comes in, they call him and he shows up immediately. And if you make the mistake of calling the dolls “Bratz Dolls” instead of the kind they are, he loses his mind and makes you say the proper name. I don’t want to think about what his house looks like, and I’m gonna bet he’s single.

3) Have you set fire to anything lately?

This might seem like a strange question but I’m sure you all remember the time not long ago when I was trying to get a picture for my literary magazine and almost set my neighbourhood on fire. And the answer to the strange question is unsurprisingly YES. On Friday night, I was making a brandy peppercorn sauce to have with the steak that Ken and I had treated ourselves with. I cooked the butter, onions, and peppercorns, then turned off the burner to add the brandy. Why did I turn off the burner? Because three times previously, I have created a brandy inferno in my kitchen so this time I was exercising extra caution. But when I turned the burner back on, everything exploded yet again. I screamed and Ken ran over, pushed me out of the way to grab a pot lid to smother the kitchen conflagration, and simultaneously threw it over the flames and turned the burner off. Luckily, no harm was done, my lashes and brows are still intact, and the brandy was successfully reduced, albeit a lot more quickly than it should have been.

The Fandangly Award. Because you deserve something nice.

Please feel free to use this very professional graphic.

64 thoughts on “Congratulations To Us All!”

  1. I love this idea. Of course I was always a fan of the Liebster Award and other blogging awards even though I never treated any of them properly. When it came to the “Nominate 5-11 other bloggers” I always got flustered because, first of all, I could come up with so many more and didn’t want to leave any out. Secondly there were some blogs I followed that stuck to very specific subjects–including some who wrote ongoing fiction as blog posts–and I didn’t want to interrupt their flow or make them feel like they reciprocate in any way.
    I worried some might even get angry and I didn’t want to bring out the middle-aged-customer-who-won’t-admit-he-secretly-collects-Bratz-dolls in another blogger.
    I haven’t set anything on fire lately but now you’ve got me wondering, what would your drag queen name be? Clearly something to do with fire, although “Burning Woman” isn’t really a name, much less a drag queen name.

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    • Me too—I was always so worried about missing someone with nominations and hurting their feelings that I rarely passed them on, more like “I nominate all of you” lol. And those dolls are Monster High dolls and god forbid you call them by the wrong name! And I’m pretty firm that my drag name is Mabel Syrup 😉

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  3. As usual, here are my thoughts, in order of conceptualization…

    First, I have never been offered an award. Ever. I’ve been working with web based technology since 1996, professionally since 1998. No awards, but this is typical of my work experience; I show up early, do good work, literally put the essence of my being into my work, and yet it has historically all gone unnoticed.

    Also, ironically, my wife Amelia and I discussed Alex Trebek yesterday, and she referenced the sketch on Saturday Night Live with Sean Connery. She still finds this funny, as do I. She’s a keeper. 🙂

    1 – Mabel Syrup. This sounds like Vermont. Or Canada. Why not both? Yes, we’ll go with that. 😉

    2 – This customer sounds like he might be a serial killer, to be honest. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with serial killers through my work as a Paramedic. They’re all creepy and all obsessed with one particular thing that most others find innocuous. Here’s an article to support my [outrageous] claim.

    3 – I’m reminded of a time I was cooking dinner and my mom’s stove caught fire. In my defense, it wasn’t anything I did. Her stove was from the 1950’s, and one of the electric burners shorted out and caused an electrical fire. I managed to move my dinner off the stove before putting the fire out with an extinguisher. My advice is to keep an emergency blanket in your kitchen. They’re made of heavy wool or fiberglass, and are often used by fire departments or in industrial settings.

    That’s all I have for now. Please continue to do good work on your blog, and keep in touch.

    Thomas 🙂

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  4. Omg I love this!! Why not nominate yourself for the Fandangly Award, it makes so much sense. I too remember these awards and I got nominate for a few and won two and then they seem to have disappeared. But who cares now with the Fandangly? I have to ask by the way, how did you come to the conclusion for the name? It’s brilliant!

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  5. I’ve got a few more years on you, and those bloggy awards were nonstop from about 2012-13… there was hardly a week that went by that someone wasn’t nominating me for something else. It got old fast, and just hearing the word Liebster makes me throw up a bit in my mouth….

    But the Fandangly Award sounds totally awesome! You just need a really sparkly and spiffy badge for it. Maybe Bratz Doll Man can help you with that…

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  6. I love the name Mabel Syrup for your drag queen personality, Suzanne. What a riot. And a great award. You’re right that the awards have dwindled lately. I haven’t seen one in ages and I think it’s time to resurrect them but with a Fandangly twist. And thanks for the caution about cooking with brandy. I’ll bet it was worth it though. 🙂

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  9. Brilliant idea!!! absolutely love it will see if I can join the party.

    OMG whatever happened to those awards, I really appreciated the spirit behind them, I even created a page on my blog to show case my awards haha.

    I also understand why some people didn’t like them, especially the more established bloggers who didnt need actually had badges on their sites announcing that as an award free blog

    Anyhoo love the idea of a new blog award challenge let me add it to my
    ever growing list of to-do posts. The Fandangly Award

    ~B

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  10. Pingback: Seriously though: Why so serious? – Anonymole – apocryphal agitators

  11. I’m generally unnerved by drag queens, mainly, I think, because I have, on occasion, been attracted to them. Let’s reverse the role here and present a show where women portray men in attractive, manly, Old Spice-like ways — what are the chances that you find yourself drawn to one or three? What might be your reaction to the realization that they were women? That feeling. It’s an internal, conflicting sensation, in my opinion.

    As to your Fandangly Award: https://anonymole.com/2022/11/06/seriously-though-why-so-serious/

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  12. Pingback: Fun-Day at My Dang Blog’s Fandangly Award Ceremony! – Willow Croft

  13. I’ve always been a fan of all things dangly: fruit, esp low hanging, earlobes and cartoon ties. And I’m sure to love a dangly award, with tassels and those macrame things we had to make at school to hold spider plants. So well done; I’m sure you’ll appear on Prime Time thanking everyone… maybe that’s the next post

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  18. I really enjoyed this post. Please don’t take this literally, but, ROTFL, or whatever.

    I’m new to this Canadian/syrup thing. It happened like this: We went to a Cracker Barrel restaurant awhile back while on a road trip. After a quick rejection of the various enormous white rocking chairs for sale out front, we went inside, rejected the entire contents of the enormous gift shop, including any CDs of Pat Boone singing Christmas songs (as it was July)–and here I admit I was briefly tempted by the wooden triangles with the holes and the wooden golf tees to play what can only be described as a weird, perverted sort of solitaire Chinese checkers only with golf tees–and went in the dining area with the enormous fireplace at the end and sat down to get breakfast. Long story short–and here I’m just kidding–I have type-2 diabetes and I’m not looking for sympathy but sugar-free syrup. They were happy to oblige and brought out two tiny Vermont Maple Syrup (sugar free) bottles to go with my enormous pancakes.
    When we left, one of us put the empty little syrup bottles in her purse.
    Fast forward to a non-chain type restaurant close to our apartment that has great pancakes but not any sugar-free syrup. We have some at home, of course, so heading over there one of us poured some of our personal syrup into the small Crackerbarrel syrup bottles in her purse. A small funnel was involved.
    At the aforementioned neighborhood restaurant we are seated and the said other person places the two little syrup bottles on the table in preparation for my pancakes. The server walks up, sees the syrup and says, “You brought your own syrup?” We answer in the affirmative.

    “Are you guys from Canada?”

    Weird.

    About the drag queen name, after a considerable amount of thought I think I would instead do “what is your alien name?” The answer would be Chrome’s suggested password for your online banking account, followed by the name of your first pet.

    Thanks again. Congrats on the reward.

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  20. I loved this post and your creativity by creating your own kind of Blogger award! Like yourself, I have been nominated for several before and all of a sudden they just stopped. You definitely deserve to be nominated for awards because you are amazing, talented, and so creative. I love what you did with this post!!!

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  22. An award of your own — such a fantastic idea! As for my own reality show, that would be The Capitalism Simulator (I may expand on some other occasion).

    And now that you mention it, I think awards have stopped going around. Good. I’ve only participated once, and once was enough.

    As always, it’s a joy reading you. If you’d like, you can knock on my door so I can open my blog to you.
    B.

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  24. I had no idea they gave out awards on here. Seriously… I’d be honored and elated. I don’t know why someone would be disrespectful about it. That said… I think I’ll definitely be awarding myself this week 😅

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  25. Okay now this post is music to my ears, I love it and I like the use of the bold font here. Also, for the nominations it is inspiring to be nominated for your work, I once got nominated by Chocoviv the blogger on the Sunshine Blogger Award where a series of questions were asked and I were to do the same and ask the next blogger those questions those were the rules I think. 🙌

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  26. I love that Special Scissors were used on the award banner. I use those scissors quite a bit – much to the scorn of those around me – but you can’t argue with the results, amirite?

    Was thinking about the creepy customer, and wondering if a character loosely based on this fellow might appear in a future story?

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    • I have an entire craft scissor carousel with an amazing variety of special scissors. And yes, I’m planning a new collection called Horror Market, and The Doll Collector will be central to the story!

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  27. I’ve noticed that, too, Suzanne — a lull in interest in the blogosphere, at least as far as accolades and promotion is concerned. I never won an award, but I was featured on WordPress Discover once, which brought a ton of new traffic my way, but even that PR apparatus has gone dormant since 2020.

    I also feel like the WordPress community is growing more concentrated; I see basically the same three dozen bloggers all commenting on one another’s blogs. I still enjoy blogging, but WordPress doesn’t feel like the robust online community it once did. Perhaps people have moved on to TikTok or podcasts or who-knows-what?

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