Welcome Guest-Blogger Philip Dawdy

As we've made abundantly clear at this site for nearly two years, pretty much anyone can blog. Fingers are more a requirement than is a brain, obviously.

That said, from time to time we actually feature something thoughtful from a person with firing synapses. Unfortunately, it's usually from a guest blogger. Such is the case today, as real, live, award-winning journalist Philip Dawdy utterly slums it, joining us for a guest stint while I'm in Mexico and while Rob figures out which of Europe's drug laws to disobey.

Dawdy blogs at Furious Seasons, which -- though it could be, given its title -- is not a commentary on his hometown Seattle Mariners since the rapid-fire exits of Griffey, the Unit, and A-Rod. Instead, as Dawdy notes:

For the last several years, I have been reporting extensively on mental health issues, locally and nationally, primarily at Seattle Weekly, where I was a staff writer until November 2006. In that time, I have interviewed patients living on the streets, in homeless shelters and in state mental hospitals, as well as patients leading more ordinary lives. I have interviewed researchers and doctors great and small. Adding together my formal reporting work and more informal encounters with patients going back to 1989, I have interviewed hundreds of people with mental illness.

[Ellipsis]

As far as fancy stuff like journalism awards go, I won awards from the National Mental Health Association for my newspaper reporting in 2005 and 2006, and have won a half-dozen local and regional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for my reporting on mental illness. In addition, I have won a national award for food writing, and 14 other SPJ awards for government reporting, investigative reporting, science reporting, feature writing and religion reporting.

Though I've pegged him as thoughtful, I should note that Dawdy describes himself as "less breast but more booty obsessed than" either me or Cicero. So there. We're very psyched to have him.