We admit it: we're getting increasingly nervous about the upcoming Billboard Digital Entertainment & Conference Awards next week. As you probably recall, Steve Jobs is up for the coveted (well, coveted by somebody, anyway; if nothing else, it'd probably fetch a few bucks on eBay) "Visionary of the Year" award, and while-- objectively speaking-- the competition's pretty thin, some pretty unlikely things have been happening lately. The very fact that a clueless poacher like RealNetworks's Rob Glaser is also up for the award seems wildly improbable, but it happened. And if the world spins off its axis for just a fraction of a second next Friday and Glaser is declared to be the bigger visionary, we fear that Steve's wrath will be terrible. We're talking chunks missing from the planet, piles of bodies sixty feet high, all the tags ripped off the mattresses in every furniture store, etc.

We know, we know-- how could anybody choose Rob "Champion of the People" Glaser as a bigger visionary? But ask yourselves this: how could anyone have even nominated him? We tell you, weirdness is afoot in the universe these days. Seriously, a Red Sox championship? We're thrilled for them and all, but it's like the laws of thermodynamics have been repealed or something. And if the unthinkable happens next Friday with Rob and Steve, the consequences could be dire.

Look, here's still more reason to worry: we were looking out our Boston-area windows last night and just happened to glance over at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York just as the judging panel of the CNBC/Wall Street Journal Executive Leadership Awards was in the process of declaring Microsoft CEO Steve "Give Me BAND-AIDs For My Knuckles" Ballmer to be the "Leader in Innovation." So clearly it's possible for thoroughly undeserving people (actually, we're not sure that Ballmer's technically a "person"-- is there an anthropologist in the house?) to win awards, and if Ballmer can be "Leader in Innovation," surely Glaser can steal "Visionary of the Year" just like he tried to steal iTunes customers by reverse-engineering iPod compatibility without a license. The end is nigh!

Oh, wait-- never mind. According to MacMinute, it was actually Steve Jobs who won the "Leader in Innovation" award, as it should have been, and not Steve Ballmer. Our mistake-- to the unaided eye from 200 miles away with no sleep and without the ability to compare odors, those two could be twins. So, Jobs did win something he deserved-- good! Maybe the universe is starting to come back to its senses and the odds of a Glaser-over-Steve upset will return to their normal immeasurably teensy values. And even if Glaser somehow beats him, perhaps this "Leader in Innovation" award will be enough of a preemptive balm for Steve's ego that he'll only eviscerate half the human race. Sweet.

(By the way, the Ballmer digs were our obligatory contribution to Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day. So no whining to the FCC about how we're not fulfilling our requirements, buddy.)