Win the OED!
Powell’s is having a contest to win the whole 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary . I’m seriously tempted to stuff the box. It says one entry per email address. Can I help it if it’s easy to generate an arbitrarily large number of email addresses?
Reminds me of the subplot from Real Genius, with Laszlo submitting thousands of entries to the Frito-Lay sweepstakes. "They made the rules, it's not my fault if there's a loophole I can exploit..."
Of course, now that you've posted it on your blog, it's all the more likely that someone else will attempt the same thing. What you should have done was go ahead and submit scads of entries, keep quiet about it, and take your prize.
Posted by Jimcat on October 3 2003 05:43
mineminemine! I will win! I must win!
Posted by bink on October 3 2003 18:46
Jimcat: The Real Genius contest subplot was presumably based on the real-life exploit of a Southern California contest offered by a fast-food restaurant chain (McDonalds, if memory serves) by Caltech students in the early '80s. They used a computer line printer to generate enough valid "reasonable facsimiles" to enter the contest with a high likelihood of winning. They won, there was something of a stink, and they collected.
Posted by Alan Bostick on October 14 2003 11:34