Mortal Tuesday – Mortality Challenge

Most of the below is identical to last time, but we thought we would repeat it anway.  There has been a minor change in the scoring.

We have been given the privilege of crafting a challenge for the Mortal Bloggers. Before we get into the rules of this Mortality Challenge, let us make a few points clear:

1) Only current Mortal Bloggers will be able to win health/poison points through this challenge. 20 points are available.
2) Non-Mortal Bloggers (and the dead) will be allowed to compete for recognition at Nobody’s Puzzles and potentially at Goozle.org. But no health/poison points.
3) Goozle.org – for those who do not know – is a domain heavily associated with Nobody’s Puzzles.

We have set up a series of questions – part trivia, part puzzle. Since we expect you to use Google or another search engine to solve the puzzle, we call this a ’Goozle’. The first one is below. Once you have arrived at an answer, send an email to: answer at goozle dot org. That is, if you think the answer is ’porcupine’, send an email to: porcupine@goozle.org.

We have set up a series of autoresponders. All mail sent to these autoresponders is deleted, unread by humans. (Your identity is safe) However, if you have the correct answer, you will receive an email back telling you the next question. If you have the wrong answer, you should receive a ’recipient failed’ message. It’s usually pretty quick, but give it a minute. If you aren’t getting a reply, there might be a problem with the server. You can send an email to goozles at gmail dot com. Tell us what the question is, and what you think the answer is. If you are correct, we will let you know the next question manually. If you are wrong, we will tell you to try again. Though we are slower than the autoresponder, and this is a race, so do try that first. And as should be obvious, mail sent to goozles at gmail dot com is read by humans. You don’t have to tell us whether you are competing as a Mortal Blogger or Non-Mortal Blogger though.

Note: Each individual autoresponder will only respond to an individual email address once a day. It’s a rule we didn’t create. So don’t accidentally delete an autoresponse, or you will be forced to rely on the human(s).

When you have solved the last goozle, the autoresponse will tell you how to notify us. For Mortal Bloggers this will involve posting an entry to their blog. Requirements for this entry will be given in the final autoresponse. For non-Mortal Bloggers this will be an email to us. Mortal Bloggers should know that manipulating the time-date stamp on their blog entries not only is ethically wrong, but will be irrelevant, as the time-date stamp on the RSS feed will still be accurate. And we may be inclined to point out any discrepancies in our results, so everyone will know what you tried to do.

Fifteen (15) health/poison points will go to the Mortal Blogger who posts first. (As long as their post meets all the requirements given in the final autoresponse.) Five (5) health/poison points will go to the Mortal Blogger who finishes, and makes us laugh the hardest with their entry. We value humor highly.

In Addition (this is the change): There will be an opportunity for those Mortal Bloggers who do not finish first to steal points away from the winner.  More will be explained in the final autoresponse.

We will give everyone 24 hours from this post. If no Mortal Blogger has finished the race yet, the five (5) points for humor is removed and added to the other fifteen (15) for a total of twenty (20) and it becomes a pure race to the finish line. (the opportunity to steal points will remain -- just the 5 humor points will be removed)..  Otherwise, once the 24 hours have elapsed, we will declare winners. We won’t announce the answers to the goozles (questions) until a few days have elapsed to give non-Mortal Bloggers a little extra time.

ALL QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CHALLENGE THAT MAKE ANY REFERENCE TO THE QUESTIONS IN THE AUTORESPONSES SHOULD BE SENT TO: help at goozle dot org or goozles at gmail dot com.  DO NOT ASK IN THE COMMENTS. Thanks.

One further note: It probably doesn’t matter, but just in case it does, all email addresses are completely in lower case. Once again: answer at goozle dot org.

We think it is time for us to post the first goozle:

1)  Back in the early days of superhero comics, a famous comic book character, still well-known today, said these words, "Be Silent, or your Daddy will slap your posterior!"  Well, not quite.  The only word in that quote that was spoken was "or".  But the meaning was exactly the same.  Just different words appeared in the word-balloon.  Name the character. 

Posted by: nobody on 10/17/2006 12:11:55 PM , 21 comments