In early spring of 2007 I decided to quit my job, sell my house along with nearly everything else that I owned, and to live out of my car while traveling the country. These are my stories (and pictures) of life on the road.

Monday, August 27, 2007

And the Answers are....

In case you missed the first part of the quiz read it first here

Thank you all so much for playing along in our little game about Battle Mountain, Nevada. Here are the correct answers-

A: It's named after a battle between settlers and indians that never actually happened.

It seems there was no Captain Pierson, no settlers and no attacking indians...ooops

C: The letters “BM” written in huge letters on a nearby hill.

This is my favorite and was my tip off of just where I was as I drove into town. It really made my day.

C: They decided to hold an annual Arm Pit festival

Apparently it's held in a pit mine, sponsored by old spice deodorant, and includes “most talented arm pit” contest. I mean really, you can't make this stuff up!

Unfortunately I apparently don't have the brightest blog readers in the world since no one that posted in the comments section was able to come up with all the correct answers. Such a shame since I had such a lovely prize in mind if someone happened to guess all three correctly. I did post a link to this quiz on a couple websites that I belong to and two people who responded to those posts did get all three answers correct though. Unfortunately one was as a result of blatant cheating, but hey, at least he admitted it.

The only person to come up with all three correct answers legitimately was my dad in his response to my post on iATN. Way to go Dad, I knew you had it in you!

Unfortunately for him though he seems to have a reading comprehension problem. You see, in my original blog post I specifically said that people were welcome to play along by posting a response in the comments section on my blog; NOT simply by responding to my post on iATN.

I think we all remember the time my dad ran an ad/contest in the local paper for everyone to correct his grammar and punctuation in said ad. He said to clip out the ad and make your corrections in red. One lady, and english teacher, came up with way more mistakes then anyone else but my dad saw fit to disqualify her since she didn't make her corrections in red. He reasoned that since everyone else had done it in red and she was an english teacher it was no ones fault but her own.

So, since my dad should be well aware to play by the rules or suffer the consequences I hereby disqualify him from the contest! That means I don't have to give out any prizes and instead will treat myself to lunch today. Yippee!

Thanks for playing everyone! Although you may not be the brightest bunch it's obvious that you're not a bunch of cheaters (except for Ole); and that's way more important in my book!

Now to be fair I must say that from the little that I saw of Battle Mountain it didn't look like too bad of a town and from outward appearances didn't deserve it's title of “Arm Pit of America” (though BM on the hill is really funny). I've driven through much worse looking places then this on my travels. And hey, you can't say the town doesn't have a sense of humor!

For anyone who wants to listen to the original segment on Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me you can download it from their website.

5 comments:

phule said...

As I've seen a number of towns in the west with a letter in stone on a nearby hill (There's one just outside of Golden, CO for example), I'm not certain what is "funny" about seeing "BM" on a hill...Could you elaborate? (I'm probably missing something obvious here...that would certainly not be the first time)

Alan Gage said...

It does seem to be much more common out west. I've only seen a few towns in the midwest that do that, probably because there aren't any hills.

BM is a more discrete way of saying "Bowel Movement".

J Ake said...

Someone told me once that the big signs on hillsides out west dated from the early days of mail delivery by airplane. He said back then a lot of the pilots were navigating by landmark, flying from one point to another on the map. I am not sure I believe this entirely - could be partly true - but there you go.

Alan Gage said...

Someone on another website I posted this to said the same thing. Well, about it being for pilots way back when anyway. He didn't say anything about mail.

So that means I read it on the internet so it must be true.

Anonymous said...

Well - of course I cheated. :)

But after finding the first letter I was laughing so hard I couldn't read the rest of the piece until I'd had a long break - the others in my office thought I had finally flipped. :)

You've reached the end of the page but that's not the end of the stories. If you want to read more (and who wouldn't!?) then click on the archive links to the right hand side of the page. They're listed by month; the adventure starts in May.

The February archives aren't actually from this trip but are previous adventures I've had, which are worth reading as well.