As if this past week wasn't crazy enough with a major national holiday and what is usually regarded as the biggest shopping day of the year, Saturday the Plain Dealer here in Cleveland finally revealed the results of its annual Rock Hall readers poll.
Over 170 ballots were sent in, either online or through the mail, and the winner among this year's nominees was none other than John Mellencamp.
Ah, but what of the write-in votes? Well, we'll let the Plain Dealer's pop critic John Soeder field that one....
Our call for write-in candidates generated a landslide of support for "Weird Al" Yankovic (who knew?), whose fans have mobilized online (check out www.allthingsyank.com/rockhall) to get the parodist of "Eat It" fame into the Rock Hall. Supporters of Harry Nilsson, the Moody Blues and Yes also made themselves heard.
Yeah, a "landslide!" In other words, Al got the most write-in votes by far!
This marks the first time our campaign has been mentioned, or our web site plugged for that matter, in the Plain Dealer...EVER! Some of you may remember back in 2003, back before there even was a Make the Rock Hall "Weird," that fans had successfully gotten Al a mention during that year's results article (even though he wasn't even eligible for induction then!)...so if there's one thing we Al fans are good at, it's polkaing the vote!
Seriously, this is incredible, as it will increase Al's visibility among those who follow Rock Hall news (no doubt Rock Hall museum president and nomination voter Terry Stewart reads the hall's hometown paper, for example...come on, Terry, shoot us an e-mail; we'd love to interview you for our movie!) and it will give our campaign greater exposure in Northeast Ohio.
We sincerely want to thank everyone who voted, whether it was because you obsessively follow our web site and blog, or just happened to see the link on MySpace, or acted on your own without any prodding from us, or whatever. Time and time again Al fans have shown that they can pull off some awesome things when we band together.
But remember, this poll was just for fun...now we have to keep working on getting this "for fun" victory realized!
There is still plenty of time to sign the petition, so if you haven't yet please contact us today. Also, if you still have pages of the petition and have yet to send them into us, please contact us now as well...just so we know what your current signature status is. There's no rush just yet.
We'll have a couple of projects and games up in the coming weeks, including our long-awaited "Who is Gordon?" poll. We'll also have some new campaign merchandise for sale, just in time for the holidays. Stick around, it'll be fun.
In the meantime, let's keep campaigning!
