More Ace of Spades Than You Could Possibly Want.

Over fourteen minutes' worth, in fact.

Via Robert Bluey's blog, I just found out what I would have realized three weeks ago, had I been paying attention: Townhall has video of the Blogger of the Year Award, along with other highlights from CPAC 2008.

You could tell when the BotY Award was about to begin: everyone unglued himself/herself from the monitor near Bloggers' Row, and physically went upstairs to the ballroom, which is normally too, um, brightly lit for our ilk. I sat next to Fausta, James Joyner, and David Foster of Photon Courier and Chicago Boyz for the speech, and watched the rest of my kin drift in as the time drew near. By the time Bluey began his introduction, the room was nearly packed with—as Dave Burge calls us—troubled loners.

"If I talk into that thing, does it make me ghey?

And Ace gave a great speech, though he did have sort of a love/hate relationship with the microphone; the right sound engineer might be able to get the mike to rock back and forth as he steps forward and backward, thereby keeping him at the same distance from it as he speaks. Would some, um, "moron" get right on that?

And we in the "new media" loved the pep talk on civic responsibility, and citizen involvement in governance. Mostly, though, we loved the idea that if we keep at this nonsense long enough, someone might hand each of us a check, just for ranting away on our laptops. (Okay—that perception is based on a sample of . . . one. that is to say, I might be projecting.)

EB: "There are conventions for bloggers?"
Joy: "Yes. They also had 'em in the 1980s for people who worked in computer graphics. Which wasn't a real industry 25 years ago; it was all subsized research and passion-fueled speculation. No one had yet figured out how to make a buck off of it."

"Oh, right . . . your husband works in that field. Doesn't he?"

Someone has to pioneer these things, you know. Trails don't just blaze themselves.

UPDATE 1: Photo added.

UPDATE 2: My other groundbreaking investigative reporting on how bloggers like to pat themselves and each other on the back is here. I managed, you'll note, to drop Joyner's name in both entries; you don't think that's going too far, do you?

I don't have any good pictures of James; most of the time when I point a camera in his direction he sports this look like, "must you? Every year? Have I really changed that much in the last 365 days?"

"Not this, again." James Joyner being a good sport under adverse conditions at CPAC 2007; pictured here with Mary Katherine Ham of Townhall and Sean Hackbarth of The American Mind.