Heeeeey! Yooooou! Guuuuuuuuys!

Hey hey! It’s that time of year again, where I ask you all for a favor. Listen, I’ve been doing this for a while, and besides a computer, some bank records, some great tee shirts, a bunch of gifts for my babies, tons and tons of great emails and a sense of weird (if highly aggressive in places) community, you people haven’t given me shit. And it’s time for that to change.

The Reader is a local Chicago paper. It’s the kind of paper that’s free and it has vaguely irreverent columns that are obsessed with local politics and culture. The back features ads for whores and personals involving dick size. You get the idea. You’ve probably got a similar paper in your town. Anyway, another thing the Reader does is host a ‘best of’ election type thing each year where people are encouraged to vote for their favorite stuff from Chicago. This is a pretty exhaustive election, boasting probably a hundred categories. One of the categories is “Best Local Blog,” and I want all of you to go here and vote for Bad Sandwich Chronicles.

It’s the very last category on the last page and you don’t have to vote for everything for your vote to count, however, you should also vote for Red Scare Industries for best local label, because it totally is the best local label, and you should all vote for Katie from the Gingerman for Best Bartender, because she truly is great. Beyond that, hey, go nuts. What’s your favorite way to subvert a survey? Put your friend’s mom’s house down for best dildo emporium? Say that your sister has the best burger in town? I honestly don’t care. I just want to win best blog. Thanks in advance!

I’d like to just throw out there, that I think it’s really nice of the Reader, an ancient and desiccated combination of paper, ink, staples, glue and folding, to give props to us new jack awesome-o’s out here in the ether totally kicking ass in the future like the hot-cocked studs that bloggers are so famous for being. I mean, you didn’t hear leeches big upping Tylenol when they started revolutionizing the headache cure. Lots of people in business don’t like to admit that they’re operating in an outmoded style, much less cheer on those who are destined to replace them (except parents), but the Reader clearly has a quiet dignity that it maintains even in the face of overwhelming evidence that its very existence is nothing but an environmental burden and a sad reminder of the days when people gave a shit about the opinions of journalists, before the great democratization of the internet, which has (rightly and awesomely) made every dumb asshole with a computer super important and capable of disseminating broad sweeping statements about how badly everything sucks, and the ability to leave homophobic slurs as responses to YouTube videos.

Now, far be it from me to shit talk the very publication that I hope to someday grace the cover of as blogger-champion extraordinaire. The Reader is where I first learned about felching and where I first read Savage Love and where I discovered that nuclear power is a great, safe, clean form of energy. The Reader is where, back before the internet, I used to find out what bands were coming to Chicago, and the Reader is the place that I go to when I want to hear a third opinion on a movie that I’m interested in but don’t plan on seeing, right after I check out the AV club and Roger Ebert. It’s also the home of Missed Connections which is one of the most hilarious and enjoyable things to read in the world (it’s a lot like the missed connections on Craigslist but, you know, there’s a lot less of them).

Nah. The Reader is pretty cool. I grew up with it and I’d really be stoked to be a part of this year’s ‘best of’ so if y’all would mosey over and vote for this blog, I promise that I’ll keep the dick jokes coming for years to come. Thanks again, y’all!

xoxoxo