ExecutedToday.com

“There are six guineas for you, and do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell.”
-The Duke of Monmouth to his notoriously clumsy executioner

Thanks to this site’s various visitors, readers, passers-by and well-wishers for your many forms of aid and comfort.

It used to be customary to tip the executioner, as the Duke — we’ll be getting to him — did. Some ultimate assertion of noble contempt, or simply a bribe in the hopes of a job smoothly done.*

With the New Year comes the silly season of Internet awards, a good time to revive the tradition of tipping executioners who hack or vice versa. This hack is wheedling votes for a couple of contests: can you spare a click or two for the holidays to stroke his vanity?

This Bloggies link prepopulates a few categories this blog will be up for; I’m particularly keen on “Best-Kept Secret Weblog” and “Best New Weblog”. The nomination window is only open for a few days and quantity of votes counts, but the process is very easy. Be sure to nominate at least a couple of other blogs you like, too (perhaps from Executed Today’s links?) — your ballot must have at least three different blogs to count.

At the expense of an e-mail registration, you can also back me for Freakiest Blogger in the Bloggers Choice Awards — an award I daresay these pages are well-qualified for — and the relative paucity of votes means yours will make an immediate impact.

* The tip didn’t make the headsman any less clumsy. Pay no attention to that.

On this date in 2002, three homosexual men were beheaded with a sword in the resort city of Abha, Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Interior Ministry announced that the men had “committed acts of sodomy, married each other, seduced young men and attacked those who rebuked them” — suggesting, despite the allusion to molestation, that homosexuality might have been the primary basis for their execution.

The incident created a ripple of worldwide attention and some pungent speculation, but the particulars remain shadowy — not unlike the ambiguous position of gays in Saudi Arabia even in the face of draconian sodomy laws.