I was thinking about the Top DUmmies awards coming around again, and it occured to me that this year seems...different.
Every year it's "different," and I am truly surprised how many times it looked as if a year's crop of primitives was going to be a dud, and then somehow at the last minute--or close to the last minute--something happens, and the crop comes forth a barn-buster.
The
Top DUmmies have been around since December 2005, but I'm more familiar with those years I wrote the awards, 2009-2014.
I will say the first year of the awards, when Dysfunctional American carried top honors, was a gut-wrenching disappointment. I'm sure even God agreed that poor stupid Beth, then known as "sfexpat2000," was clearly the Top DUmmie because of her antics during the Scamdal earlier in the year, but there were enough sour-assed old grouches at our old home who were "tired" of the late red round one--bored to death with it, didn't like it at all, thought it made us look bad--to nudge the vote for this less-worthy candidate.
The first year I wrote the awards, 2009, the top five were interesting and exciting--the top winner being Pamela, then the greenbriar primitive--but the lower-ranking ones pretty mediocre. That was the year--the exact date being December 17, 2009, at 3:30 a.m. (it's one of those things one
never forgets)--Tangerine LaBamba, disillusioned with Skins's island and wishing to make a death-bed (really; she died a few days later) confession so as to cleanse her soul, came over here to unburden, to spill the beans on the primitives. Right on franksolich's lap.
<<<still considers that one of the luckiest breaks ever received in life.
The second year, 2010, was noted by my writing what I considered the very best award ever given a
Top DUmmie, the sparkling old dude. It's true he lost out to Anne, the wretched miserable old bitch the dysmenopausal Kansas school teacher, coming in second, but I really enjoyed writing that particular award.
For those who don't know, the sparkling old dude's in the food-service consulting business, with a couple of partners. I'm sure that his partners, after seeing this award, printed off hundreds, of not thousands, of copies of it, to include with their other materials promoting their company, to show how well-connected they are.
The year 2011 was again the same; the top five were brilliant choices, but the following fifteen, pretty boring.
The election year 2012 was a bitch, providing perhaps the most controversial winner yet.
Never mind; there's still disagreement because the winner was a mole, not a
bona fide primitive, but being the one who made the rules, I was okay with that. It's something that's always sort of likely to happen--we don't know all the moles, all the legits--and the people had spoken. Even though a false primitive, the people had spoken, and were heeded.
The years 2013 and 2014 featured, as winners, one-event primitives--but an event so large, so astounding, so stupendous, so magnificent, that it rolled over the primitives who'd worked so hard all year long and perhaps deserved to win because of their hard work and earnest efforts.
Everybody's criteria for top primitive is different; some judge primitives by what they do all year long, others by the spectacularness of some deed they do, even if only one deed all year long.
