ROUND THREE: semifinals!!

A flurry of votes led to the face-offs listed below. I would go into more detail, but I want to write about Sri Lanka and then go to bed. Voting for the semifinals is open until Tuesday at 9am California time (11am Iowa time, 12pm Eastern time, 9:30pm Hyderabad time).

Apologies about the fact that you now have to play that 'enter the word' game when you post a comment, but it's an attempt to stop the ridiculous comment spam that always made me feel like I was popular until I opened the comment and found out that it was a lame automatic advertisement for something. If this is too onerous for you--well, you must not care about me anyway.