FAQ Contest: winner!

Okay, it’s time to announce the winner of the FAQ contest! In fact, I should have done so this morning, but one thing led to another led to another, and the end is that it’s 10 PM and I still haven’t gotten around to it, mostly because I also said I would post the answers to my FAQ section and I have not gotten around to doing that, either. [ADDED NEXT MORNING: And I fell asleep doing this, so . . . not so much on the timing.]

All righty then–time to announce winners? Yes.  Time to post answers to FAQ section? No.  That I put off for another day.

There were a lot of really great questions.  And apparently, I didn’t say that I would pick the winner by lottery, but that the person who asked the best question would win.  Well, you know the statement–there are no stupid questions, right?  Well, there are no stupid questions, but there are questions I don’t want to answer.  And then there are questions that I am going to really enjoy answering.  So the question I had the most fun answering was this one:

Q. If cavemen and astronauts got into a fight, who would win? Note: No weapons.

A. Astronauts. I was originally going to say cavemen, because they are scrappy, but cavemen basically all suffer from malnutrition and astronauts train physically, are in top physical form, and must pass mental and physical exams that put them in the top percentage of today’s population. The cavemen don’t stand a chance.

And it looks like C.J. Redwine [ETA: OOPS!  Not that CJ!] asked this question — so, congratulations, CJ!

You are the winner of an entirely completely thoroughly double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome fantastic very good prize!

The absolutely completely thoroughly double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome fantastic very good prize, as you may recall, is a $15 gift certificate to a bookstore of your choice and a super-secret something, and now I have to reveal what the super-secret something is!  Which brings us to the other reason I haven’t written this post yet–I do not know what the super-secret something is!   In fact, in a fit of too-clever-for-my-own-good, I decided that the super-secret something would get better every time I mentioned the vitally absolutely completely thoroughly double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome fantastic very good prize, which I didn’t do all that often because I’ve been busier than usual, and now I have to go through and figure out what is happening with the super-secret something.  And I am supposed to be clever about it, because hey, otherwise it will be boring, plus it will take up two pages.

Ha ha!  Solution: I will wait until 10 PM after a busy day, and then everything will seem funny!

So, without further ado:

The Super Secret Something

prize = paperclip

good prize = piece of three-hole punched paper

very good prize = ball-point pen

fantastic very good prize = sharpie

awesome very good prize = autographed sharpie

incredibly awesome very good prize = pad of paper

truly incredibly awesome very good prize = empty 3-ring binder

wonderfully truly incredibly awesome very good prize = post-it flags

double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome very good prize = copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and The Road to Wigan Pier (which moves us out of the office supplies, and into the creative arts!)

completely thoroughly double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome very good prize = CD of Mahler’s 6th

absolutely completely thoroughly double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome very good prize = DVD of the Princess Bride

vitally absolutely completely thoroughly double-plus wonderfully truly incredibly awesome very good prize = … okay, I fell asleep last night trying to figure this out.  I was initially gung ho for chocolate, because who doesn’t like chocolate?  But then I realized that my very rhetorical question has a very nonrhetorical answer: C.J. Redwine doesn’t like chocolate.  Darn.  [ETA: Except CJ Redwine didn’t win, and I am just dumb.]

So I tried to find something else that would work.  And then I got all confuzzled and decided that this stupid idea of deciding super-secret things–things so secret that even I do not know what they are–after the fact is just the dumbest thing ever, especially when I am on a deadline, and so I hereby announce that the super-secret something is a gift certificate for $20 to wherever CJ picks for the first gift certificate.

—

A note on valuation: It is hard to assign “value” to these things, as I said the prize would become “better” with each iteration.  For instance, how many things can be said to be “better” than a DVD of the Princess Bride?  I can’t think of much, honestly.  But then, I figure just about everyone already has a DVD of the Princess Bride–including me, and I don’t even have a TV–and so the real question is: how many things can be said to be better than a second DVD of the Princess Bride?  Which, you must admit, is a totally different question altogether.

I am never doing a contest with a super-secret something again.

All FAQs to be posted tomorrow (or, y’know, by the end of the week seeing as how I’ve been so good at all of that so far).  If I don’t answer a question, it’s because my answer would be really stupid and I have nothing clever, smart, funny, to say in response.