Bone In The Fan

How cool is that? So cool. Because I never win anything in random drawings. Free drawings, benefit drawings, lottery drawings. Nothing. Ever. Never ever. Except jury duty. That drawing I seem to be pretty good at. Not that I’m bitter.

I won this. I really did.

Once though, back when I had my web design company in NYC, we designed an online contest for CBS that was based on the NCAA basketball tournament.  You’ve seen it: the basic bracket deal where you pick a winner for each game in each round.  You make 63 picks and if you miss a bunch in the first bracket, you’re hosed. So we built this thing, and to test the system and have a live control account for the duration of the contest I randomly filled out the entire bracket of 64 teams, 63 games. Well, not quite randomly - I did make some picks that I was told were pretty stupid, like Princeton (seeded 13th)  over UCLA (seeded 4th) in the first round because Princeton was my dad’s alma mater (I only remember picking Princeton - I had to go to wikipedia to figure out who they played and how they were seeded.)

Anyway it gets to the final four teams (3 games left), I’m tied for the lead with one or two other people who I am quite sure could actually name some of the teams in the tournament besides Princeton (something I pretty much could not and still cannot do - not a college basketball fan, me), and I start getting really scared that I might actually win. Explaining to the CBS legal team why the guy who produced the game also happened to win didn’t worry me at all. Using up my once-in-a-lifetime-against-all-odds event though, that most certainly did. I picked those games randomly; winning that stupid contest (for which I could not collect a prize) against those ridiculous odds could mean I’d no longer have a shot at winning lotto. Or driving an F1 car. Or meeting an intelligent politician (that was the hackiest, most obvious layup of a comment ever - I really suck sometimes.) Of course in retrospect, I’ve realized that my OIALAAO event doesn’t necessarily have to be a good thing which still leaves me vulnerable to a lightening strike or shark attack.

A lightening strike map. I live in Florida. You figure the odds.

But the cookbook (which by the way is signed by chefs from the first three seasons), that I’ve won fair and sqare. The odds weren’t a million-to-one, but since I usually lose even a three-to-one drawing (unless it’s for who should test the ice on Hook Pond before we go skating) I’m feeling pretty lucky there, punk.  I won it simply for leaving a comment over at Sticky Gooey Creamy Chewy (link in roll on left) which is a pretty kickass food blog and totally worth visiting (this post on peach ice cream literally made me drool), even if I’ve already won the cool prize.  So go visit.

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