Good morning, friends! First of all, thank you all for the kind birthday wishes and for your generous gifts and donations!! You all are the best! Second, I’m putting the finishing touches on the worst McMansions in Virginia, which has been no easy task! But first, it’s time to kick off a new tradition for this blog, a gingerbread McMansion contest!
Your task is to create the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!! If you succeed, you will be rewarded with cool merch and even some money (as much cash as I’m able to put up):
Prizes!
First Prize: $200, a T-shirt, and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store.
Second Prize: $100 and a T-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store
Third Prize: a T-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store.
Honorable Mentions: stickers from the McMansion Hell store and an award certificate
All winners will be featured on the blog and will be mailed an award certificate.
Rules and Regulations:
• Gingerbread structures must be constructed mainly of gingerbread and icing.
• Styrofoam and other support materials are not permitted.
• Entries must be original, don’t just assemble a pre-made kit.
• All components of the display, except for the base, must be made of edible materials.
• Edible materials include candy, nuts, cereal, cookies, crackers, pasta, and other food items that do not include wrappers or sticks. Wrappers should be removed from candy and other decorations.
• Entries must be created this year
Entries will be judged on:
• overall appearance (30 points)
• originality/creativity (30 points)
• workmanship/technique (30 points)
• difficulty (10 points)
Registration starts December 2nd, 2018 and ends January 2nd, 2019. Winners will be announced January 5th, 2019.
Submissions (including photo upload) will be handled via this Google Form:
Australia just passed into law one of the world’s most censoring copyright law,
which allows the country’s media giants like Village Roadshow to use
one-sided administrative process to get court orders to censor any
website whose “primary effect” is infringement, then use those orders to
force search engines to delist any site so blocked, and then recycle
those orders to block for any site or service that “provides access” to a
blocked site or service.
In other words, Village Roadshow can now censor any site it doesn’t
like, without the site’s operators being present to argue their side,
and then block search engines from displaying that site’s contents,
making it virtually impossible for everyday Australians to learn that
the site has been blocked – and they get to block tools like VPNs that
might allow people to get outside this censoring national firewall that
they get to run.
The pricetag for this is a secret: thought Village Roadshow gave AUD1.2
million to pass the precursor to this bill, Village Roadshow refuses to
say how much it spent in this cycle, and Australia’s backwards
election-spending transparency rules mean we won’t find out for months,
after this has faded from the news cycle (prior to this bill, Village
Roadshow’s all-time lobbying spend topped AUD6.7 million).
Remembering Oscar Wilde on the anniversary of his death
November 30th 1900
This is a picture of his original grave,
“He was buried in the eleventh grave in the seventh row of the seventeenth section of Bagneux on 3 December. A simple stone with an iron railing around it” Richard Ellman
Remembering Oscar Wilde on the anniversary of his death
November 30th 1900
This is a picture of his original grave,
“He was buried in the eleventh grave in the seventh row of the seventeenth section of Bagneux on 3 December. A simple stone with an iron railing around it” Richard Ellman
