The Meta Contest Winner

As was mentioned in the minutes of our last Emergency Meeting, the Elgin Street Irregulars met last week and selected a winner from among the entries to the Meta Contest.

We made a list and checked it twice with thorough discussion of the merits of each entry.

Tiana: choose a location in the city and people need to determine that place via your excruciatingly obscure clues and photos.

Lovely idea for a contest, we're good at excruciatingly obscure, but...

• maybe not so good at clues and photos.
  

A. & J.: Show off hidden gems of Ottawa. Nothing touristy, easily visible and it has to be in the downtown core. Something that only the locals would know about. A real hidden gem.

Lovely idea for a contest, but...

• It would be a fair amount of work; and
  
• We want to keep our gems hidden; look at how the Usual Spot has been wrecked by popularity.
  

Ted: I think you need to recruit a new regular to save your blog.

A new recruit might indeed save our blog. It could be like Rock Star: Supernova or the Search for the Next [Pussycat] Doll and the contestants could be given tasks that would generate blog postings for weeks and weeks (example: This week we want a photo-shopped image including elements from a 60s TV show and Stéphane Dion's shadow cabinet), but...

• We're probably not ready for a new member[*]; and
  
• We don't really want to be like Rock Star: Supernova; we'd rather be like the Ed Sullivan Show.
  

Harmony: I was thinking of hidden gems too. But I know a couple that aren't exactly in the core (though not outside the green belt either!). Could we expand it to include a larger area?

Sorry. We're the Elgin Street Irregulars. We are not suburban people.

zoom: [Entry #1] ... how about a treasure hunt? You hide something wonderful somewhere in the city and offer a series of daily clues (photographic and/or textual) to its whereabouts. The Citizen did this decades ago - they hid a gold bar...

A lovely idea for a contest, but...

• We haven't got a gold bar to give away; and
  
• It's been done.
  

zoom: [Entry #2] You could even have a pre-contest contest in which people could enter their suggestions for prizes.

Congratulations Zoom! This is the perfect suggestion for our next contest because it:

• Is easy;
• Lets us stall a while longer before coming up with a real contest; and
• Perfectly captures the self-referential nature of this blog.
  

A big thank you to all entrants. We regret that there could only be one winner. None of you are losers. (Except in the sense that you did not win, and therefore technically, you lost.)

Details on the Meta-Prize Contest will be posted on the weekend.