Why should the Carnival of Real Estate declare a definitive winner? Because appreciating excellence is the corollary of human achievement

At BloodhoundBlog, we’ve complained publicly and privately about a recent trend in judging the Carnival of Real Estate. It is typified by these odious words: “In no particular order.” The mass of posts is winnowed down to a first cut, then anything making the cut is listed “in no particular order.”

This is probably intended to be nice, in the sense of not hurting anyone’s feelings. We’ve judged the Carnival twice, using a very rigorous scoring matrix, so I know that the distance between best and fifth-best can be immense. It might seem nice to elevate fifth-best to stand beside the best, but it is a disservice to the person who expended the far greater effort to produce truly exemplary work. And it is a disservice to the audience, as well, to fail to distinguish the greater from the lesser.

I warned about this the first time we hosted the Carnival:

No, this is not rocket science, brain surgery, world peace or any other presumptively momentous endeavor deployed fallaciously to diminish every smaller endeavor. But anything worth doing is worth doing well, wisely, completely, coming as close as we can attain to the sublimely perfect. Excellence is ennobling, and to make a habit of excellence is to lead a noble life. And as far from the earth-shakingly momentous as a Carnival of Real Estate entry might be, is is nevertheless a piece of your life — whether you are the writer or the reader — an irreplaceable portion of all the forever you will ever have. Whyever would you waste it?

Frankly, I consider everything I have to say on this subject to be painfully obvious. So to avoid elaborating on the banal in prose, I’ve elected to do it in film instead.

You can see it by going to YouTube or by viewing the video below:

Each judging weblog has the power to do as it chooses — and BloodhoundBlog certainly takes full advantage of that license — so I can but appeal to the better angels of the judges: Please do everyone a favor by taking the extra time to distinguish truly excellent work from those posts that deserve every credit for having aimed for the sublime, but still somehow missed the target. We will all be better — as webloggers and as people — for having aspired to be the best, knowing that this is a prize that can be won.