Help a blogger win $100

Today, I am asking for some help from my friends. And your friends, too.

For me, it could mean $100 in Greater Muscatine Chamber of Commerce & Industry bucks, which would be the closest Brome Hill has come to generating income. More in a minute on how you can help.

A growing number of readers visit this blog when I link to it on Facebook and Twitter. God bless ‘em if they actually click on the links and read them.

Another 125 readers subscribe to this blog, according to WordPress.They include 74 subscribers who are mostly relatives, friends and readers who liked my columns and other work in the newspapers where I used to collect a paycheck. They receive an email alert whenever something is posted here.

The other 51 readers are fellow WordPress bloggers. Today’s post is being written as an appeal to them and their friends.

Bloggers are often disparaged. If you don’t believe me, scan the definitions listed by Urban Dictionary. Some of these definitions may apply to me. But the reason I started blogging is I had nowhere else to turn after I lost my newspaper job in February. For me, blogger equals unemployed writer.

And that makes $100 in chamber money a bigger deal than it might have been otherwise. My friends at Vision Center PC in Muscatine are sponsoring A Vision of Muscatine photo contest. The winner gets the $100, which would keep me in contact lenses for three or four months.

So far, my photo is in second place with 43 “likes.” It trails the first-place photo by 12 votes. You can help change this IF you have a Facebook account and are reading this blog. Please click this link and then click “like” on my photo. Share the link with your Facebook friends and ask them to like it, too.

“Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I’m going to get mad. Goodnight.”

Oh, wait a minute. that was Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee, giving some direction to Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

The only thing really at stake here is my eyesight, but I’d still appreciate your help. It’s embarrassing how close I have to hold my iPhone in order to read and send text messages when I don’t have the contact lenses.