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Golden Apple Was A Wild, Zany Ride
Hey, guess what? You know the Golden Apple everyone went crazy looking for? Well, it was actually an invisible apple, a "pretend apple" if you will. Any one of you could have walked right in to this newspaper office and "pretended" that you had it, and we would have given you $100. Okay, that's a lie. I made it up. In fact, the newspaper doesn't even give out the prize money. But the "pretend apple" joke doesn't seem too far from the truth, judging by the difficulty everyone had trying to find this mysterious piece of fruit. The golden apple was finally found by Metta Graf and Dan Harlos on Tuesday afternoon. It's a good thing, too. Some strange rumors were starting to circulate about this year's $100 apple. Let's take a look at some of those theories. The apple was kidnapped. We never received any ransom letters. And even if we had, our newspaper has a strict rule against negotiating with criminals, especially when it concerns inanimate objects. Someone took it, just to be a jerk. I guess someone could do that if they wanted to. But is the fun of being a jerk worth more to someone than $100? Probably not. Jerks seem to enjoy money, just like the rest of us. Someone mistook the golden apple for a real one, and ate it. This would be highly unlikely, seeing how the apple is fake. As much as we all love the taste of painted wood, the golden spray paint would have probably caused some health problems for anyone who consumed it. Besides, I can assure you that here at HCN, we would have been all over a story like that. Nothing sells papers like articles about people eating spray paint. Of course, now that I've publicly mentioned the "eating spray paint" story idea, it's off limits. But we would still come out to laugh at you, and take pictures for our own amusement. I know a lot of you have other golden apple contest questions as well, so let's take a look at some of those. Did you help hide the apple? No. I knew the apple needed to be harder to find this year, so I did offer my suggestions. Unfortunately, my idea of duct taping the golden apple to the muffler of my car was promptly ignored, as was my idea of using rope to tie the apple to a turtle in the Mississippi River. Did the people at the newspaper even know where the apple was? A few of us did. I knew, but since I'm still fairly new to this area and don't know all the little nooks, crannies and secret spots, this piece of knowledge was utterly useless to me. Did your editor purposely make the clues harder this year? Yes. In past years, the golden apple was found before all the clues were even released, so the difficulty was pushed up a notch this year. That, or my editor is sadistic. Either way, it made for a great golden apple search.
Will this event be done again next year? Yes, and I'll give you the first hint now: look for it swimming somewhere in the river.
(Want to see what the column actually looked like when printed in the newspaper? Click here.)
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