Wampum

Although I thought I acted with foresight to begin our fundraising campaign for the 2005 Koufax Awards way back in October, obviously I failed to do something right (grovel perhaps?), as we are still over a thousand dollars away from our minimum goal, made all the more desperate by recent hardware failures. It seems from comments here and on other blogs that these awards do mean something to the Lefty blogosphere, as does the fact that some people are even willing to endow some prize money for this year's winners. I believe, however, that we're putting the cart before the horse here, as it seems silly to offer cash prizes if we can't even afford to run the awards. But that's just cynical ole me.

So this is my last plea. Please support the awards by tossing some coin into our Paypal or Amazon kettles on the upper left sidebar. We already have thousands of nominations, more than double what we had this time last year, and we suspect many more when the nominations are scheduled to close next week. The cost in time and resources is tremendous, and we are just three people trying to balance running the awards with work and parenting a combined total of six children, three of whom are autistic, three neuro-typical.

Addendum: Like Digby, we have had wretched luck getting ads (Blog Ads actually turned down our application last year, in the midst of the 2004 awards,) and our Google Ads click through rates were abysmal (when you write on Iran, you get "Iran-singles" ads; when you write on Indians, you get "Check your DNA for Injun ancestors"). We sent out offers to a number of 2006 campaigns months ago. We get hundreds of thousands of hits during the Koufax Awards, one would think some advertisers would be interested in that market.

Update 12/23: I'd like to thank everyone who contributed yesterday. As of this morning, we're a little less than halfway there. I'd update the side graphic, but I spent the night chained to the WC, having inherited a whooping case of Rotovirus (or some related viral gastroenteritis) and barely have the energy to sit up to type this thank you. (I'll be sending out my usual personal thank you note when my own laptop returns from the shop, as I haven't figured out how to get my email running on my daughter's iBook.)