Huskies Fan chomped Capitol Hill Seattle, while Lookout Landing opened up an enormous lead on Three Imaginary Girls, which is to be expected when their competition is imaginary. And now, it’s Mariners vs. Huskies. Two sad, downtrodden fan bases competing for the only title they’ll see this year. Between Carlos Silva’s pitching and the Huskies inability to play defense, I’m expecting a high-scoring matchup filled with incredible frustration. Because that is, after all, what every Seattle sports fan expects — the crushing of all hopes in the most indignant way imaginable.

Bottom half of the Squirrel Bracket begins… now.

UPDATE: Apparently, there are some folks who think gaming the system is fun and exciting. Well, gaming the system can hurt you. It can damage tendons and ligaments. It can cause aggressiveness. It can make your balls shrink. Do you want to end up like Jose Canseco? No, you don’t, do you.

This is why you can’t have nice things. It’s back to the crappy polling system for you.

UPDATE 2: And that system just quit, too. Wonderful. So, on to version 3. Written in old fashioned HTML that makes me wince when reading it. Just kill me now.

The clock runs out Monday at 9pm PST, or when someone fires Bavasi, whichever comes first.

And now, the perfunctory links to the other open polls:
West Seattle Blog/Citizen Rain - Hillku/Kirida (closes Tuesday night)
Seattle Daily Photo/Blogging Georgetown/Mid Beacon Hill - Defective Yeti/Glitter Pissing (closes Wednesday night)
Seattle Bubble/Accidental Hedonist (closes Sunday night)

The original bracket post

Tomorrow: Can poetry beat motherhood? Can Citizen Rain stage a comeback? Are we staring at a West Seattle showdown?

photo by arion potts [flickr] via our group pool [#]. we’re always looking for new contributors, so send you pretty pictures our way!

• Sean Nelson vies for title of today’s smartest Slogger, writing on the topic of electability and how being undecided doesn’t mean being braindead. [slog]
• Starbucks to reboot barista training on 26 February [sbuxgossip], rebooting wifi in a switch from pricey t-mobile to a little closer to free at&t [sbuxgossip]
• KEXP to “liberate” NYC radio. [kexp]
• Green tacos to go with green beer (biggest surprise: chipotle broke its ties with mcdonalds). [bravenewleaf]
• Scanning craigslist, finding lots of people all hotted up by caucusing. [seattlest]
• A preview of next week’s talks, including “A pseudoscience guide to geek dating”. [igniteseattle]

tournament of blogs reminders:

• Round One — closes tonight: music & P-I groups (three imaginary girls have a few more votes than sound on the sound; huskies fan ahead of ear candy)
• Round One — closes tomorrow: people & friends & “enemies” groups (kirida with a huge lead ; citizen rain fending off the big blog)
• Round One — closes Thursday: art & ‘hoods (pike/pine trails glitter pissing ; mid-beacon hill a few votes up on blogging georgetown after a polling reset)
• Round Two (started today): Seattle Bubble with an early lead over U.S.S. Mariner and Vintage Seattle ahead of Accidental Hedonist.

So dpolls died, taking our balloting system with us. Who knew the “d” stood for Diebold?

I’ve replaced two of the polls — Ballard and U District — with new ones. In the other two, I’m going to go ahead and declare winners, since I knew the margins were already wide and I don’t think Chris Pirillo was about to loose his minions upon the poll… unless that’s what brought it down….

Please congratulate West Seattle Regional champion Seattle Daily Photo and Capitol Hill Regional champion Lookout Landing. On Friday they will face off for the a berth in the Championship Round. The Ballard and U District champions will also face off on that day in the other semifinal. Maybe if one of you is nice you can make some nice “regional winner” graphics, because I sure can’t.

Technology sucks.

We close out Round Two with the U District Regional, which goes on Friday, the day of the week I’m most tired. So I end up writing pithier comments. Given my penchant for Faulkneresque 100 word monster sentences, this is probably the day to ask me to write something for you that’s under 500 words and over 4 sentences.

U DISTRICT REGIONAL
Regional Semifinals
February 16
#1 Not Martha vs #4 USS Mariner
Someone paged Megan earlier this week, and her readers showed up. She had more votes than the entire Capitol Hill regional. And now, she has USS Mariner — and its vast collection of Mariner fans and scalliwags — in her sights. But knowing Derek, he probably doesn’t give a rat patootie about this contest. Unless, of course, I mention his new book, The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, which you should pre-order a copy of today.

#2 Horse’s Ass vs #6 izzlepfaff
Capitol Hill Seattle played with fire. And they got burned. Bad. And hoisted on their own petard. And let’s assume there’s another military cliche here, because I’ve run out of them. Now it’s Goldie vs. Skot. Liberals vs. humorists. But aren’t most humorists liberals?

And here are links to the other three regionals: West Seattle, Capitol Hill, Ballard.

Next week, the Regional Finals. We’re getting closer to wherever the fictional finals site would be. The Space Needle? Elephant Super Wash? Dick’s?