One might not realize this because of my infrequency of posting, but I spend a lot of my day reading the Internet. I can’t help it really, it calls to me like that extra slice of pizza peaking out from under the box lid. Oh yes, my RSS reader is heavy with the weight of 500 pieces of saucy pie.

And so it was, this morning, whilst I was perusing the “comics” section of my reader when I read in the FLOG about a new blog.

“Hmm,” I thought and Clicky Click Click there I was at the latest Seattle-based blog.

Hulk #208 was different. I like the idea of Hulk becoming Bruce Banner again and living like a normal person. It’s a nice change from all of that violence with different villains coming and attacking Hulk.
That was the extent of my first letter published in a “real” comic book, real meaning Marvel, sometimes DC. Anything else was fairly contemptible to the thirteen year-old connoisseur of the form I considered myself to be, back in those halcyon days of the mid 1970s. I was a “true believer”, a pocket money-offering pilgrim to the mighty Marvel Comics Group, a division of Cadence Industries Corporation.

Go. Read the whole thing. Then tell me if these three posts he’s written are any indication that this guy could claim WSB’s Blarch Badness crown in 2009.

So, it hasn’t exactly been a rosy ending to what was a promising start and what can only be called a mid-level debacle. But we have to finish the damn thing, don’t we? (According to the other Metblog authors waving sharpened sticks at me, yes, we do.)

To deal with the blown brackets and broken sites, I’ll just put the last three blogs that appear to be standing in the final:

Accidental Hedonist (the only blog left from the Squirrel Bracket)
Seattle Daily Photo (which got caught up in the site shutdown mess)
West Seattle Blog (who has the most votes of the non-cheating blogs)

And the site still won’t let me embed stuff (good job on the design, Head Office), so you’ll just have to go elsewhere to vote:

VOTE IN THE GRAND FINAL

VOTING CLOSES 5PM ON FRIDAY.

And then at 6:30pm on Friday… The Trophy Presentation at the Skylark Cafe, 3803 Delridge Way in beautiful West Seattle. Come meet bloggers and their spawn. Heckle me! And drink our beer (if we have any).

I give up. There’s just so much gaming and governing and finger-pointing that I don’t have a choice, regardless of whether Seattle Bubble already withdrew.

I said if anyone was cheating, I’d throw everyone out. So, everyone in that side is hereby disqualified. The other semifinal on the Coyote side continues, at least for the moment.

Honestly, I don’t feel much like continuing this tournament. This was supposed to be fun, and it’s far from fun now. I can’t deal with the melodrama, or chronological adults acting like a bunch of spoiled kids.

The antics of Lookout Landing have left me embarrassed to say I’m a Mariners fan. And considering the sort of crap the M’s have pulled the last 13 years, it’s awfully hard to get me embarrassed about being an M’s fan.

And the other semifinal is a rematch of last year’s consolation matchup. Will Seattle Daily Photo prevail again over West Seattle Blog?

UPDATE: The new system is stripping all sorts of code, including the code that links to the polls. So, if you want to vote in this, GO HERE.

Wednesday night at 9 PST, we’re done.

Meanwhile, the other semifinals — and the mudslinging fun that has broken out around it — continues.

Home stretch, folks. It’s almost over.

One of the points of Blarch Badness is to get small good local bloggers more exposure in an increasingly noisy Seattle blogging world. Kirida, which is on a surprising run into the Final Eight, fits right into that model. Mona is a 25 year old native of Saipan who blogs about life as a sailor-mouthed mother in West Seattle. The folks over at West Seattle Blog nominated her for the tourney, saying that she’s the funniest blogger on the Westside. I would have to disagree — she’s one of the funniest this city has to offer, and it’s time she stopped being a West Seattle secret. Of course, now West Seattle Blog has to face the very blog they nominated. How ironic.

I pried an interview out of her while she was changing her husband’s adult diaper.
Read more

Last of the quarterfinals now. Seattle Daily Photo held off a late challenge by Blogging Georgetown, while Glitter Pissing continues its Cinderella run.

Did Cinderella piss glitter? Or was that Snow White?

Hurry, sale ends Wednesday night at 9pm.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
Seattle Bubble/Accidental Hedonist (closes Sunday night)
Lookout Landing/Huskies Fan (closes Monday night)
West Seattle Blog/Kirida (closes Tuesday night)

The original bracket post

And that’s the quarterfinals. Just two rounds to go, starting with the first semifinal on Tuesday. I really need to shorten the time periods up next year.

Blogging Georgetown is not my idea of a typical blog. Why? Because it is useful. John P. consistently delivers passionate, yet thoughtful and well-written advocacy that not just informs his neighborhood, but the surrounding city as well. I may have only been to Georgetown once, but I still read Blogging Georgetown frequently and was more than pleased to be able to interview its author for this tournament.

It was just about this time last year that you were making the switch from P-I Reader blog: Georgetown Stew to Blogging Georgetown. Did the transition and (I imagine) resulting freedom affect your writing as you expected?

Writing for the PI blog was tough for me, because I feel my legitimacy as an independent writer was undermined by the fact that Hearst more or less was getting a freebie, and I was giving it to them. I believe it made it tougher for the community to see my writing as advocacy. In moving on, I could experiment with different topics without fear that I was wandering too far off of the blog’s mission; to escape a sort of self-censorship I felt when I wrote for the PI blog. The end result was–I believe–me being more effective in what I originally set out to do.

Are you still the only contributor?

Yes.

You’re anonymous, right? How does that affect your ability to report things in the neighborhood?

I’m semi-anonymous. A cross-search could easily reveal who I am, where I live, and what I do for a living. But people in the neighborhood know who I am. I dabble in various local projects and I feel that those personal connections help keep me accountable for what I write.
Read more

Defective Yeti was one of the four sites picked to receive an automatic bid during our Blarch Badness author caucus and for good reason: Matthew Baldwin, the man behind the Yeti, is quite possibly the best humorist writing in Seattle. (So much so that I can even forgive him for getting that damn Thank you for being a friend song stuck in my head for a week.) After threatening to debase myself further with pathetic begging, he kindly agreed to answer a couple of questions about his site and the Badness.

With the fact that we didn’t formally inform people last year that they had been entered into our little tournament, did you even know you were in it?

Oh my goodness, of course. I’m as obsessive about my referral logs as the next self-absorbed blogger, so as soon as the first person clicked over from your joint I was all over it like hollandaise sauce on Eggs Benedict. Disgusting, disgusting hollandaise sauce.

But, you know, I was nominated for a few Bloggies there back in Ye Olde Olden Dayes of blogging and was soundly beaten by a newcomer with name recognition in his corner, a pivotal moment in my life that engendered in me both a healthy wariness of Internet-related awards and a lifelong vendetta against Wil Wheaton.

You put up a pretty good showing considering your competition, West Seattle Blog, is - in my opinion - the Mafia. How do you deal with your popularity?

Ignore it, when possible.

In the wake of losing the aforementioned Bloggie, I resolved to make my site as popular as possible, and spent the following year trying to write memetic posts rather than writing about the things I cared about. Twelve months of that was quite enough, thank you.

Since then I’ve done pretty well at not giving a rat’s ass about readership (as is probably evident in my rather desultory posting schedule of late)(where “of late” = “since 2003″). At this point I’m not even sure if I still have one, though dozens of people still comment on each and every one of my posts to point out my copious grammatical errors.
Read more

Mid Beacon Hill tried to concede gracefully when the Hood polls were taken over by Diebold. But would we let her? Noooo. Instead we forced her to stay in the race AND submit to an interview by me - drunk and obnoxious spice metroblogger. Why? Because we like her and because we think she’s doing good work. Since J is also extremely nice, she complied with only the slightest hint of arm twisting. Let’s jump right in, shall we…

How many minds are behind Mid Beacon Hill?

Just me.

Are you completely anonymous?

At this point, I’m only nominally anonymous.

When and what got you started in this tawdry blogging business?

A year ago I was doing a lot of gardening and wine drinking and neighborhood picture taking, and I happened to come across a blog by this guy in San Francisco who was doing the same. I loved how his drunken little photo essays captured his love of, and his ambivalence about, the neighborhood where he’d settled down. First I became an obsessive commenter on his blog, and then I decided I had to totally rip it off.
Read more

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?