Pretty heady stuff for a chubby old picker! Thanks for the plug, Larry, it would be fun to win. Another fun thing has been meeting so many talented singers and writers over the past three months in the process, from Ontario to Israel. Some of us from the competition are planning on putting together a songwriter round near DC in March, if we can find a venue that will have us for a night.

Okay, so I finally figured out FolkAlley's bizarre voting procedure. I had it all wrong before. :-/

Go here:
http://www.folkalley.com/openmic/finals

To vote, you actually click on the box for the song you want. The page will reload, your chosen song will have moved towards the bottom of the page and a red check mark appears next to it -- BUT YOU ARE NOT DONE YET! Scroll down to the bottom of the voting page and hit the bar that says "finalize my vote and view results" or something like that. Once you have done that, you will be taken to the results page, and be able to see how the song is doing in the contest.

Sheesh. Confusing. Just listening to the song and rating it helps too, but voting for it helps the most (evidently?). Crazy.

I believe the voting interface was designed to making gaming the system more difficult, particularly for this final contest. And while I appreciate every vote, I also want to stress only ONE vote per person, please. Of course I want to win, but I want to win fairly!

Thanks to everyone who voted! "Tommyknockers" took the People's Choice Award, but never got close to the Grand Prize. That means it got the most popular votes, but the judges and Folk Alley staff pretty much thought it sucked. But we got bragging rights! An award's an award, we'll stick it in the bio and nobody has to know it was a consolation prize. Well, unless they read this...