Bloggers Without Borders

Thanks to NPW for the merit badge you see in the sidebar to the right. I'm so good I'm excellent, and now I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Actually, Courtney got one too, so now I'm left wondering if NPW really only wanted to honor one of us but didn't want to make the other feel bad and cause any domestic strife. Courtney's post yesterday was stellar, so maybe I'm the charity case.

On second thought, NPW strikes me as a pretty cutthroat individual. Charity's probably not her style.

Either way, and despite the fact that I believe the quality of this blog has deteriorated significantly of late (no, I'm not fishing for compliments here), I've been reflecting on the state of our blog union and want to share my thoughts. I was going to wait to write a post like this until my one-hundredth, which should be in about another month or so, but in the span of a few minutes this morning I left comments in Russia, South Africa, and various locations in the eastern US. I think that's pretty cool.

That's three continents, people. Moscow, Russia is my friend Emily (Traveling Em), who teaches math at an international school. Her posts are rather sporadic and she hasn't been around the Waitress lately, but I attribute that to the cosmopolitan diversions of a city of nine million vodka-swilling Russians. She is not to be confused with just plain Em, who is the only commenter and member of my blogroll who lives in the same area code as me but doesn't leave dishes in my sink. You'd think I'd start local and work my way out, but it's only been fairly recently that I've intersected the orbits of other Knox bloggers.

And then there's Sid. I don't know where she came from (aside from Capetown), but she just showed up in the comments of some of my friends' blogs and we took it from there. She's stuck around and I've noticed some other folks have found her blog as well. She's funny and irreverent (two things that mean nearly the same thing to me) and if you haven't gotten past the revolting name of her blog and visited her at the Cape, you should. I'm joking; I think Verbal Diarrhoea is a great name.

Of course, most of my blog friends (outside of the Georgia crowd, who I'm bound to read regardless of quality, though they do all happen to be solid, witty writers), come from the northeast. I don't know how Courtney came to read NPW, but that was my source for all the Yankee blogs I've made a habit of checking on a daily basis. I know those folks in the Boston area (not to mention the owner of a certain Mr. Met) won't appreciate being called Yankees, but that's how they roll down here in the South. They still call the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression," although much of east Tennessee was actually pro-Union.

Anyway, this wasn't a post meant to single out specific blogs by merit. Rather, I just wanted to point out the growing geographical diversity of our little blogiverse. If anybody reads any cool blogs from South America, Asia, or Australia, let me know. Or if you know any scientists blogging from the South Pole, we can try to score all seven continents! Quality first though, people. I don't want to be reading about some dickhead climatologist's latest ice-core findings unless it's in the next issue of National Geographic.