I can't compete.

A small glimpse into the contest's results at this point is probably better than nothing at all, so in that spirit, here's a small glimpse. I need to stress that this is far from complete. There are still 500-700 entries which haven't been reviewed at all. And of those that have, it is very hard to decide which ones should go to the judges.

Because it is taking so much time, I can't devote much to sharing the entries. I've made a partial dump of the database and turned them into simple pages. At this point, we are trying to maintain anonymity for the judges, so none of the entries are labelled with names and email addresses (though I didn't edit them out when they appear in the descriptions or in the entries themselves). They are in no particular order. Not all entries made it into the database. Of those that did, many have been eliminated from judging already. No entries from these two groups are shown.

Without further ado, I present:

  1. The finalists (as of April 9).
  2. "In the stack" (as of April 9). These entries are currently being considered by the reviewers.

Notes: Some of the entries were larger than they were supposed to be (but at least had a sense of humour about it) while others were much larger (and didn't have much of sense of humour about it). There were many entries which were strangely self-referential and many more curiosities that will get cataloged in due course.

I will try to update this page at least one more time before the winners are announced on May 1.

If you want the page that was here until April 9th, it is still around. As is the explanation for why things are taking so long. As is the original contest site.

My friend Jason put a lot of work into coding the database and custom app we are using to track, review and judge the entries. You can help me thank him by signing up at his site Gradfinder, and then people who you went to high school or university with can see how you are spending those dot.com millions, how wonderful your spouse is, and what a tremendous vocabulary you acquired while pursuing that PhD in 17th Century Literature. Of course it's all free. Thanks Jason.