Contest! KAPOW! Name this book review series, ninja minions!

EDITED TO ADD PRIZE INFORMATION! SCROLL DOWN! SCROLL, DAMN YOUR EYES!

So it’s been a big week here at the little bloggy wog – the godlike and powerful Elizabeth Bird gave me and my bud Tara Lazar a shoutout in the January 13 edition of Fusenews for our joint book review of When You Reach Me! Exciting stuff. So of course the aftermath of that has kept us busy. Tara’s been interviewing candidates to be her new cabana boy, and I’ve been pricing a lot of bling and designing a nice, big plaque celebrating our awesomeness. It’s gonna have a lovely neon-purple powder-coating – nothing but the best, little ones. High-class all the way.

But on to the meat of this blog posting! Now that Tara and I have finally achieved the vast, puffy, irritating, overblown level of self-importance and pomposity that we deserve – we are sooo pompous – we need a NAME for our blog-jumping book review series. Up until now we’ve stuck with a few vague references to Ebert & Roeper, but over time I thought we should really make at least a token effort to come up with something more original. Then I had an even better idea! We should try to convince other people to do it for us! Seriously! Tara has lots of friends, I have an imaginary Twitter empire with a bunch of semi-engaged minions, certainly we can bamboozle–err, I mean request help with this monumentally important task, right? RIGHT?

*crickets chirping*

Okay, FINE. Ignore me if you like, WE DON’T NEED YOU! And when I say “we don’t need you,” what I really mean is, “we desperately need you,” so come on now, help us out. This, my friends, is the latest contest on the ole bloggy wog.

COME UP WITH A NAME FOR OUR BOOK REVIEW SERIES. The rules!

1. Make it reasonably short. We burn up a lot of precious and irreplaceable time nattering away on Twitter, so it should be tweetable, with enough leftover characters for a link and some amount of explanation. Say, 90 characters or less.
2. The contest will run until MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2010.
3. Leave us some way to get in touch with you, will ya? Email address, Twitter handle, blog ID, something like that.
4. Send me fifty dollars in cash. I know, I know – that’s an insultingly low amount, I’m worth more. Don’t worry your little heads about it, it’s okay.
5. That fifty dollar rule is more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast rule, but you should feel free to act as if it’s a hard-and-fast rule.

All clear? It gets even more fun and exciting from here! First, the winning selection will live in fame and glory ever after as the title of our fabled, award-winning, euphoria-inducing book review series, hailed by several anonymous Internet commenters as “kinda funny” and “not too annoying, I guess.”

Second, I, Mike Jung, Chief Bloggy Wogger, Founder and Despotic Leader of Mike’s Empire (the Premier Twitter-Based Imaginary Empire in the Known Universe), Destroyer of Worlds and All-Around Sensitive Guy, will BUY YOU SOMETHING. Probably a book. Okay, definitely a book. Maybe even – ooh – more than one book. But not definitely more than one. Definitely one book, maybe more than one book. Curb your greed, you jackals. We’ll announce a more…defined prize, as soon as I feel like it.

AND NOW I FEEL LIKE IT! Okay disco minions. First: I’ll buy you the YA, MG or picture book of your choice, from the indie store of your choice, on indiebound.org. Second: I will personally write a lovely (if misshapen and terrifying) poem about you! For a sample of my poetry work (the only sample, truth be told) check out my honorable mention in the Angry Robot poetry contest. Third: I will design, print and send you (via Zazzle) a one-of-a-kind, first-time-ever #mikesempire t-shirt! With some kind of demented slogan on it! How, oh how can you resist?

Invent a title for the Tara and Mike Traveling Roadshow and Middle-Grade Novel Review Tour and put it in a comment right here. We will pick the one we like best! What’s that you say? It’s not an objective contest? That’s not fair? Well, people of the teeming online multiverse, I must reiterate one of the bedrock maxims of this blog, which is to say, LIFE IS NOT FAIR, please accept the grossly unfair nature of this thing we call life, that is all.