The 2009 Turkey Awards

An annual tradition for over a decade! This is my list of ridiculous persons — natural and unnatural — from 2009 (so far). Pass me one of those rolls, please:

• The Greasy Gravy Award for oily publicity that makes the main dish inedible goes to Amazon's PR department for its role in #amazonfail.
• The Red-Tide Oyster Stuffing Award for carelessly poisoning an otherwise tasty dish goes to the creators of Category I... and the maroons who publicized it without disclosing their own conflicts of interest.
• The Broken Wishbone Award for shattering dreams goes to Harlequin Enterprises for its inexcusably deceptive and conflict-of-interest-laden vanity press program, variously called Harlequin Horizons or Dellarte Press. Leaving aside various trademark problems that make this a delicious potential law-school exam question, one must wonder just how stupid Harlequin's corporate madames think authors are... and, sadly, conclude that they're probably right, at least in the aggregate.
• The Golden Gristle Award for assertions far too difficult to digest (and usually stuck in one's teeth) goes to Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, for his "defense" of the GBS settlement. He is apparently under the impression that the only people who should be allowed to profit from copyrightable materials are those who distribute them — not those who create them.
• The Crabapple Pie Award for marketing something sour as something sweet goes to the Washington Redskins for the corporation's intellectually dishonest position in litigation over its logo (and name).
• The Brussels Sprout Award for stinky, slimy, overcooked, gentrified little cabbages goes to the British Parliament for its continued refusal to reform its libel laws to conform to reality, to consistency with either the European Union's or "democracy"'s limited principles of free speech, or to avoid the class-hostility pretensions built into them.
• The Dried-Out Breastmeat Award for overcooking the books goes to the captured financial regulators who enabled the current economic mess (or, some might argue, made it inevitable).
• The Rancid Drumstick Award for something that should be edible, but isn't, goes to the class counsel in the Google Book Search settlement.