The voting for the J-Walk Blog‘s spam poetry contest ended early Monday morning, with yours truly losing by a single vote. Mr. Walkenbach, the blog’s proprietor, notes that “Matt’s victory is even more remarkable, considering that Eric attempted to sway the vote using the power of the blog.” I realize that he’s not saying there that blogging about the contest was against the rules or anything, but I never figured that telling friends about an online popularity contest would be suspect — and in any event, I didn’t ask anyone to vote for me. (I realize, however, that may not make a dime’s worth of practical difference; what are the chances my friends would vote for the other guy? I’d guess that even most strangers reading this blog would likely be sympathetic rather than objective.)

But I’m pretty sure “Matt” — the winner — rallied votes too. If not in a blog, then in one of many possible ways. It was fascinating watching the poll numbers change throughout the weekend, and I checked in frequently. Most of the time I was actually ahead. And I noticed that Matt’s numbers remained stagnant for long periods of time, then increased rapidly in bursts. No accusation of cheating, here — he could have, say, taken a moment at work to ask an office full of techies or telemarketers to vote, which would easily explain at least one of the rapid increases.

I really should have anticipated that readers of a quirky blog would largely go for the “funny” poem. And it rhymes, so it must be good, right? But there are no real sour grapes here, since I did like the winning poem, and since online voting isn’t much of a measure of anything, and since we all know that my poem was better anyway. Yep. So I’ll forego Spike Lee‘s perennial Oscar quip of “We wuz robbed” (he also used it for the title of his segment in a documentary), and instead butcher a classic observation by Allen Ginsberg: those contest voters “wouldn’t know poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.”