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.

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.
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And now, the Battle of West Seattle. In one corner is last year’s semifinalist West Seattle Blog, wielding its mighty Westside user base. In the other corner, you have Kirida, who was nominated for the tournament by West Seattle Blog. The student now faces the master. And since West Seattle Blog is involved, you just know the polling system is going to crash.

Open polls blah blah blah:
Seattle Daily Photo/Blogging Georgetown/Mid Beacon Hill - Defective Yeti/Glitter Pissing (closes Wednesday night)
Seattle Bubble/Accidental Hedonist (closes Sunday night)
Lookout Landing/Huskies Fan (closes Monday night)

The original bracket post

Tomorrow, the last of the quarterfinal brackets.

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?

And there will be a new champion this year, as Seattle Bubble destroys USS Mariner. On the other side, Accidental Hedonist knocks out Vintage Seattle. Guess you folks like to eat more than you like to look at old pictures. What the hell is wrong with you people?

So, real estate vs. food. Welcome to the first quarterfinal, or the first semifinal of the Squirrel Bracket. However you want to refer to it is fine by me.

In the other brackets, the races in the bottom half of the Squirrel Bracket are far from settled (closing Monday night), the top half of the Coyote Bracket is not completely settled (though you Hillku fans better get on the ball before Tuesday night), and the bottom half of the Coyote Bracket is wrapping up Wednesday night so vote early and often.

For those of you confused about how this process works, here’s the original bracket post.

Tomorrow: Are we looking at an all-sports quarterfinal? Did J and/or K anger the wrong sorts of Huskies fans? And can anything stop to Lookout Landing juggernaut?

Ring the bells, throw the biodegradable confetti, ping your blogroll, for we finally have a winner in Blarch Badness 2007: USS Mariner, which eased past Lookout Landing to be crowned king of all Seattle blogs.

Here’s the final tally:

For All The Marbles...
USS Mariner  56% (3005 votes)
Lookout Landing  44% (2389 votes)
Total voters for this poll: 5393

The third place finisher was Seattle Daily Photo.

So, Derek, Dave, Jason, and Jeff (via live feed from Okinawa) will be able to hoist the Blarch Badness Trophy… just as soon as I get them one. Anyone want to make me one?

Will we do it again next year? Probably, but with some changes. But in the meantime, it was fun, right?

photo by marksobba [flickr]

While war is still waging in the Blarch Badness Final it might be unethical of me to pimp one of the competing blogs — but I’m going to regardless. If you have a problem with that, watch out for a trident to the heart.

Lookout Landing’s Jeff Sullivan is the [way less nerdy] John Clayton of Mariners baseball. With spring training in full swing and Opening Day just a few weeks away, it’s definitely time for even the most casual of baseball fans to prepare for a long, dark, horribly depressing M’s season (thank you, Bill Bavasi!). In that spirit, I highly recommend listening to a very informative and insightful interview Jeff recently gave to Big League Baseball Report [blbr]. In it he recaps the wretched Mariners off-season (where art thee, Doyle!?) and their prospects for success in 2007. I’ll offer this hint: A certain member of Venezuela’s royal family needs to have a great year for the M’s to stand a chance.

Confidential to Jeff: Contrary to what you think, you absolutely did not sound like a douchebag [LL].

The last regional final starts now. Not Martha is not not done. Horse’s Ass becomes the last political blog to exit. So now….

U DISTRICT REGIONAL
Regional Finals
February 23
#4 USS Mariner vs #6 izzlepfaff
USS Mariner continues to move on. There could be two baseball blogs in the finals — and we thought support for the Mariners was dead. Meanwhile, izzlepfaff keeps right on going, further than three of the #1 seeds.

UPDATE: dpolls croaked. Switching providers. Hopefully, this will hold out. Keep in mind that with this new system you can vote as many times as you want, but PLEASE DO NOT ABUSE THIS. If you do, I’ll stop the contest and we’ll settle it with a coin flip. Please only vote three times. Be a good ballot box stuffer and know when to say when.

Take Our Poll from PollDaddy.com

And, of course, the perfunctory reminder of the other three regional finals: West Seattle, Capitol Hill, and Ballard.

We took your input. We haggled over who should be in or out. And now, it’s time to announce the brackets for Blarch Badness. Who has the Best Blog In Seattle? Let’s find out.

Originally, it was going to be 32 blogs, but after some talking we decided to add three “play-in” rounds, bumping the total number of blogs to 38. We’ve grouped the extras into certain classes you’ll see in a moment.

And an apology to the 30 or so we also considered that didn’t make it, in addition to the thousands around the area we just didn’t know about. We’ll do better next year.

So, without further ado, let’s warm up Billy Packer, cue the theme music, and unveil the brackets!
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