It’s getting to be that time of year – time for the City Pages’ “Best Blogs” competition!

Now, if you’ve followed this tradition, you know it’s actually two awards:

• BEST LOCALLY GENERATED BLOG (LEFT-WING): Previous winners, MNVolved and Clucking Spoo – leftyblogs that laid a thin veneer of humor (MNVolved) or gimmick (the Stool) over strident, constant, headbanging left-leaning politics.
• BEST LOCALLY GENERATED BLOG (RIGHT-WING): Previous winners, Nihilist in Golf Pants and Faithmouse – right-leaning blogs that don’t write about politics all that very much.

So the handicapper’s game is to figure out:

• Which leftyblog puts the “hippest” gimmick (or, given that “pseudo-hip” is the new “hip”, perhaps one of those instead) on top of the most strident left-leaning point of view, and
• which right-leaning blog puts the thinnest possible veneer of rightward tilt over the least-political content possible.

So let’s take some nominations!

I’ll start out with my own choices:

• Bogus Gold: Doug Williams’ tomato-and-wineblogging doesn’t beat you over the head with politics, lately (although to be sure he’s one of the good guys); also, BoGo went un-updated due to Williams’ extended blogging sabbatical last year, which would probably make it City Pages’ ideal conservative blog.
• My Opera Life: This blog is all about life as an opera student, and touches not in the least on politics, other than being married to a conservative blogger (which may be mentioned once or twice in the past year and a half).
• Pianomomsicle: Jessica Gensmer writes about cooking, raising her baby, married life and faith. The closest thing to conservative political statement anywhere on the blog is a link to, as it happens, Shot In The Dark. Which might be too much for the City Pages’ staff, and thereby makes her a dark horse.

I’ll take your nominations in the comment section, and have a runoff election later this week, followed by the grand finale early next week.

Then, we’ll wait to see how close it gets to the CP’s picks.

I’m all tingly.