"Judging the hilarious, the pathetic and the bizarre..."

Through an effort to revive an old bit from our previous format, we've decided to bring back The Weenie Awards, but things are a little different now!  For those of you who can remember back to our earlier version of the awards, it was basically a column designed to honor and bring attention to the weird and misguided individuals that roam the world around us.  Now we've completely changed the entire concept, layout and presentation of the awards, but the humor is still in there, somewhere.  Besides, the logo was just too cool to throw away...

Just about every site on the Internet has either an award that they give out or a list of ones that they've won, so keeping with the trend (because we're wild and trendy guys!) we're creating our own award - The Weenie Award.  Don't get us wrong, unlike the name implies, (in most cases) this is a great honor to receive and it will one day be considered the pinnacle of many of its recipients' careers.  The winners will receive a secret prize, which can't be revealed here because then it wouldn't be a secret!  "How does this all work?" you may be asking.  Don't worry, we'll explain the whole process very slowly in small words and short sentences.

It all starts out with an egg.  Inside this egg are what we call nominations.  Eventually, this egg will hatch and you'll be able to view all of the nominations under each individual category, listed in the menu on the left.  Normally this egg hatches on time, but if the weather is really nice outside or the editors are in the middle of playing a new video game, the whole hatching process could be delayed by as much as a day or two.  In either case, a good excuse such as 'extended research' or 'server problems' will be announced and the schedule will be kept as normal the following Monday.

After all the nominations have been posted and made available for a while, the time will come for the voting to commence.  We've decided that this voting will begin on August 22, 2001, which coincidentally is the day that our next issue will go online!  For the following two weeks we'll be accepting ballots, until September 5^th comes along.  Everything will then be tallied and the winners will be featured in the September 13^th issue of Just Laugh - lucky number thirteen!  Let the media explosion begin.

Who does the voting for these awards?  That's a good question, and it's too bad we're not quite ready to answer that yet!  Although the main goal of these awards is entertainment, we're also hoping to see it serve as a reward for all those who have contributed to Just Laugh magazine so far this year which is why you, the readers, will be doing a portion of the voting.  This is your chance to show the columnists and cartoonists that you like the most around here just how great they really are.  The People's Choice awards are often the most prized awards from any program and ours is no different.

We'll also be asking a few professionals to give us their top picks in the remainder of the categories to find out where 'the industry' stands on this stuff.  You've listened to the editors and staff of Just Laugh rant and rave about their likes and dislikes, so now it's time to get the opinions of some of the other folks in the 'biz!  We're not the only ones on this Internet-thing that can be funny...

So stay tuned to this spot to keep updated with the latest happenings about The Weenie Awards.  Our heart-felt congratulations are extended to all those who were even nominated, but remember this: