HOLY CRAP! Voting has been open for the Koufax awards for 10 days!

I've been sitting around waiting to hear or find out when votes would begin being accepted for the Koufax Awards (the prestigious national award for which this humble site has been nominated in the category of Best State or Local Blog)

After all, I wanted to give Dope readers a good head's-up and mount a powerful vote drive to get Dope-heads of all stripes to vote early and often.

But I confess, I haven't exactly been checking in over there on a daily basis or anything. It's not as though it was the most pressing thing on my mind.

So I just happened to think of it a minute ago and checked back over there and saw that the post listing the nominees in my category still said that the voting hadn't started yet.
OK.
It's been a while though, I thought, and I was beginning to wonder when the hell they start it.

Then I notice that in the comments people were writing in names of blogs. That curious. I scroll down. More of them. Maybe they're just jumping the gun. Then I notice that there's hundreds of them. What??!!

Then I look back up at the post itself. Yep. Still says that voting hasn't started yet. I wasn't seeing things. But where can I find out when it starts?? And why are there hundreds of comments with blog votes???!!!

I finally gave up and remembered that I'd seen a graphic to click on to contact the blog owner on the previous page. So I went back and looked in the sidebar to find it. I was going to resort to writing them and asking them specifically when the hell this voting started.

I go back a page and look over the little boxes in the sidebar and then I saw it.

I caught something out of the corner of my eye. In small print lost under some graphics, almost as if it was deliberately hidden, were the words, "Voting has begun".

WHAT THE HELL??!!!!!

WHEN???!!!

I frantically looked to see when the first "vote" comment had been left to figure out how long voting had been going on, and to my horror, saw that it had started on March 4th!!! NINE DAYS AGO.

So voting for this oh-so-important award has being going on for nine days now without my having a clue. So much for my big plans to rouse up a huge outpouring of readers to go over and charge to the top of the list.

Unbelievable. And who knows when voting ends. I guess they'll be just as obscure about that as they were about when it started. With my luck, they'll probably have closed the voting while I'm writing this.

But just in case you'd like to give your own local blog a vote in this prestigious national competition, go to THIS PAGE (SOON) and leave a comment mentioning your vote for The Inside Dope.

Looks like my first campaign is off to an inauspicious start, but maybe it will catch fire now that I've actually noticed that the race has started.... 9 days ago. (ugh!)

I Believe in a Place Called Dope.
I love my family, I love Mamma, I love all kids and cute animals, and I think your kids are especially good looking and bright. I support the troops, I agree that you or your company/cause/industry/interest group needs more government breaks/subsidies/lifting of regulations/increased regulation/tax breaks/grants/sweetheart deals/hand-outs and believe exactly the opposite about your competition. I'm a big fan of whatever sports team you support. I pledge to improve cultural values and provide an opportunity for personal expression, I'll make this blog a better place in which to live and raise your family. Even with gas at $2.39 a gallon, I'll still rely on your voluntary donations, or the terrorists will have won.

I'll always tell it straight, never let you down, make all your wildest dreams come true, and more importantly,
I know where the bathrooms are. (even in the dark.)

May the God of your choice bless you.

So please, vote soon, and

VOTE DOPE


UPDATE** I just found out, by accident following a link to another blog which happened to be listed in the trackback section for the Best State or Local Blog post at Wampum, that the voting would have already been closed if not for a techincal problem. It's only due to a technical glitch that we didn't miss it entirely. Now they've extended the voting period until midnight tonight.
Yep, boys and girls, voting has been going on for 9 days now, and us Dopers have less than 24 hours to swamp the site and trounce the competition.
I've sent a suitably irate e-mail to the bloggers who run this competition pointing out the last line of their post on this category still reads, "So here they are, the nominees for Best State and Local Blogs. As in the two previous categories, voting is not yet open."