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.

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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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?

West Seattle Blog launches their Blarch Badness campaign tomorrow, facing the winner of a Friends/Enemies group contest that’s down to the wire. So I pinged them on The Facebook and they obliged an interview in the midst of their plans for global domination.
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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].

Well, here we go. 38 blogs to start, but there can be only one.

Today is the prelim round of voting, or “help us figure out what to do with the nine blogs we couldn’t decide on.” This is a one-day-only vote, so cast your votes now.

So, without further ado… click some links, make your decision, and vote away.

The “City Beat” Play-in (All blogs that talk about the city and its neighborhoods)
Winner advances to face Defective Yeti in Ballard Regional

Daily Weekly
They were really riding the bubble going in. Post-New Times Cultural Revolution, they’ve lost whatever “edge” they once had. But history prevails here, I guess.

Pike/Pine
We all love Jasmine’s photo-illustrated fashion aesthetics. We’re looking forward to her getting back to photos of Seattle people again.

West Seattle Blog
West Seattle… it’s like a whole other country!

Bus Chick
We had a hard choice here — do we really need a third P-I related blog on the list? But we all love her writing; she’s better than some of the staff bloggers at the other papers in town (Angela Valdez, I’m looking at you).

People Play-In (every person that you know… they’re known as nouns)
Winner advances to face Not Martha in U District Regional

Glitter Pissing
Rakka briefly wrote for Metblogs, but she’s mainly here because she’s such a geek — and a creative and crafty one at that.

Slumberland
Wendi Dunlap has been blogging in one form or another since before “blogging” was a word. And she has a Little Nemo obsession. Gotta love that.

Monkey Disaster
This would be John Moe. You might know him from such movies as “Stop! Or My Mom Will Blog About It!” Wait, that’s Troy McClure….

LiveJournal Drama Play-In (because what is life without LiveJournal drama?)
Winner advances to face Slog in Capitol Hill Regional

jameth
New Metblogger Kristen suggested we pair off two of the big local LiveJournal people in a battle to the death. I don’t have an LJ account, so I have no idea what the drama is about.

Jason Fortuny
Remember that big Craigslist controversy last fall? With the guy that ran the ad as a woman then put everything he was sent on the Internet? Yeah, this is that Jason Fortuny. And now, you have the opportunity to vote against him.

And there you are. Nine go in, three go out. Tomorrow, we start Round One with the West Seattle Regional.