Contest Winner Announced!

Last week I held a contest to gratify my ego, and as it turns out, eight people read this blog. Plus David Cox, who told me in person he refuses to comment. I feel honored. In high school, I only had like three friends, so I've tripled in value as a person, and I'm growing as a human being. Seriously - I'm like a half inch taller than I was when I came into college, though I've lost ten plus pounds. A few more years of this and I'll finally be a man.

My thesis is a novel about time travel. My advisor is an actual editor for Amy Tan and a few other memoir focused feminists, so my time travel apocalative is exactly her forte. In December I gave her the first fifty pages. She emailed two days later, saying she couldn't read it. The grammar was horrible and she hated the narrator. Use Christmas break to find yourself, then give me some haikus written in purple crayon. I can't read anything else, because your horrible prose blinded me.

I kill off a lot of characters in my novel. That's real power. I found myself creating characters just so I could shoot them in the back. I had to create a special gun to do it, because machine gun is a very bulky phrase. I named the gun after my high school English teacher. He inspired me to kill.

The contest was for the naming rights of one of the characters who is predestined to die. The goal was to write out the longest number. David Lee won with:

781,999,848,697,363,675,452,846,934,391,129,306,904,482,811

The first number is pronounced, "googoplexian," which is also what humans will be called when the search engine Google renames the planet. They aim for the stars. Other entries included one, infinity, and David Lee plus one.

For our fraternity's last date function, I didn't have any leads, so at the Kappa house where I work, I wrote on the pantry chalkboard, "If you want to go to a BYX function with the houseboy with a beard (since many of them do not know my name), please put your name in the jar below." After two meals, I had three names. Alex's roommate's put hers in. Julianne, the president, was in there eight times; eight different girls, none of them Julianne, submitted her name. The only girl who put her own name in thought she was signing up for a late plate. I picked her.

David is not a really unique name. His middle name, Raleigh, is good, but it's almost too unfamiliar. I think it might be distracting. If his last name, Lee, was his middle name, and he was referred to in a southern manner as David Lee, as we call my cousins from Kentucky Holly Rae or Billy Joe (no joke - Billy Joe Murphy. He's 6'7" and 330 lbs. He plays offensive line for the University of Kentucky. He's a big boy), it might be okay. So I will kill David Lee in my thesis novel using the gun I named after my AP Literature teacher.