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Caskets On Parade ... 2002 Contest Rules
  Caskets On Parade  >  2002 Contest  >  Rules

    8/25/01 `Non Sequitor' cartoon with our own take on the situation
  1. The contest is open to any individual, or group of individuals. Groups must identify all of their members, and these individuals may not participate in other groups or submit a solo entry.

  2. Entry Method & Deadline:

    1. Electronic entry submission may be made by anyone with a "stable" Internet POP/SMTP-compliant Electronic Mail (E-mail) account. Entries must be made as uncompressed ASCII text messages (no attachments) to the designated Caskets On Parade E-mail address. The subject line of the message must be "2002 Contest Entry". The message must have been received by your own E-mail server prior to 06:59:59 EST December 31, 2001 (20011231 23:59:59 UTC), and must be received by our server prior to 24:00:00 EST January 3rd, 2002 (20020104 05:00:00 UTC).

    2. The designated Caskets On Parade E-mail address is: 2002contest@casketsonparade.org

    3. No Snail-Mail or hand-delivered entries will be accepted for the 2002 contest.

    4. Within days of receipt of an entry we will acknowledge receipt of that entry. The E-mail address found in the "Reply To" field of the message header will be the official E-mail address of the entrant. Reply address must be unadulterated --- no editing will be performed to remove such phrases as "nospam". Acknowledgements that are bounced as "unknown" addressee or "no such server" will cause cancellation of the entry.

    5. Unless entrant explicitly releases C.O.P., all E-mail addresses will be embargoed; the usage of the E-mail address will not go beyond contest administration for the 2002 contest & announcement of the 2003 contest. Freemail E-mail accounts set up for the purpose of shielding entrant's personal E-mail accounts from spam are acceptable.

  3. No ADDITIONS, DELETIONS, CORRECTIONS, ELABORATIONS or CLARIFICATIONS to an entry will be allowed after it has been transmitted (see rules 7 through 11).

  4. The scoring period of the contest is from 00:00:00.001 local time January 1, 2002 to 24:00:00 local time December 31, 2002 (local time being defined as the time-of-day at the location where a victim meets the Grim Reaper).

  5. All entries shall contain a list of up to 75 potential victims of the Grim Reaper that the entrant expects / hopes will die in the year 2002, as well as information identifying the entrant(s).

  6. The names on the list of victims must be of people sufficiently notable to have their passing mentioned* by AT LEAST one reference in 3 of the following 6 categories:

    Wire
    Services    		 Major
    National
    Newspapers    		 Network/
    Satellite
    Radio
    or TV
    News/Sports
    Services    		 "Popular"
    Media    		 News
    Magazines    		 Internet
    Resources
    • Associated Press
    • Reuter's
    • United Press International
    • Chicago Sun-Times
    • Los Angeles Times
    • New York Times
    • USA Today
    • Wall Street Journal
    • Washington Post
    • ABC
    • CBS
    • CNN
    • ESPN
    • NBC
    • NPR
    • PBS
    • Entertainment Tonight
    • Inside Edition
    • MTV
    • The National Enquirer
    • People Magazine
    • TV Guide
    • Newsweek
    • Paris MATCH
    • Sports Illustrated
    • Stern (Germany)
    • Time
    • US News & World Report
    • the alt.obituaries newsgroup
    • the Official Darwin Awards website
    • the Dead People Server website
    • the Who's Alive and Who's Dead website
    • the You're Outta Here! website
    «or»

    by Unanimous Nomination of the Audit Committee

    Owing to the abysmal educational state of the public media, re: social, cultural, historical awareness, we've decided that we needed another mechanism to qualify individual victims that would have easily received three qualifying obituaries in decades past. Please don't lobby for a favored victim ... it only pisses-off the Committee members.

    Successfully predicted deaths will only be scored if they meet the "one or more obits in each of three categories" test. «or» by Audit Committee recognition.

    The 2002 Contest scoring closes at 05:00 a.m. (UTC) on February 15, 2003. In addition to the "three in six" requirement, for any death to be scored in the 2002 Contest the first qualifying category obituary notice must have been published/broadcast no later than midnight (EST) January 25, 2003 (20030126 05:00 UTC) and the third qualifying category obituary notice must have been published/broadcast no later than midnight (EST) February 14, 2003 (20030215 05:00 UTC). Grim Reaper victims that died in 2002 but whose obituary notices missed these deadlines are not scoreable in the 2003 Contest either.
    Hint: Pick popular, friendly, outgoing people that will die in the middle of a crowd of network news anchors during a live breaking news event broadcast, not cranky loons living in tarpaper shacks out in the boondocks, alone without family, friends or neighbors, surrounded by starving cats & empty vodka bottles, that send long rambling diatribes (like this one) written in crayon on toilet paper, entombed in intricately hand-worked wooden boxes and mailed in non-descript manila envelopes to local overnight radio talk show hosts complaining about NSA mind control probes that are beaming signals into their cerebral cortex.

    *"No Feathering One's Nest" rule: any obituary article or notice written or co-written, produced or co-produced, voiced or otherwise broadcast by an entrant is automatically excluded as a qualifying mention in a category.

  7. Only the first 75 victim names on any list will be considered for use; additional names will be discarded.

  8. Names of victims already deceased, duplicated listings of a single victim, or insufficiently specified victims (see rule 9) will count toward the 75 name limit, but will not be listed as scoreable for the entrant.

  9. All names must be sufficiently specific to identify only ONE person. Use "Jr.", "Sr." or other designations when appropriate. When in doubt the Date of Birth, Place of Birth, title, job description, nickname or other biographical information will help establish the unique identity of your intended victim. The correct spelling of the name is not critical as long as other information supplied can be used to distinguish between several similarly-named potential victims (for example "Roger Smith"). When a name (especially the last name) is incorrect, the biographical information is an absolute necessity. Listed victims which are insufficiently identified will be excluded from your list of scoreable victims.

  10. All victims must be homo sapiens; no dogs, cats, cartoon/comic characters or other entities will be allowed for scoring purposes (their listing will, however, count toward the 75 name limit).

  11. Accidentally aborted or stillborn fetuses will count as age zero for computing points to be awarded for the death. Intentionally aborted fetuses can not score in any judging category.

  12. An entrant scores when one of their listed victims dies.Points for victims are based upon the age at death of the victim and the uniqueness of their selection. The maximum number of points that may be scored for any victim is 15.0, based upon the following formula:

    
 125 - Age          2.5
-----------  +   ---------
    10                (n-1)
                     2
    where "n" is the number of selectors for that victim

  13. Decisions of the Audit Committee are final.

  14. The winners of the contest will be determined by the entrants' performance in the four areas of scoring:
    1. total Points Scored
    2. total Number of Kills
    3. total Number of Solo Kills
    4. Quality of Kills

  15. The BIG DISASTER scoring category is back! You may specify a Disaster that will claim at least 200 lives within 24 hours of the initial occurence of the Disaster.

    In addition to the nature of the Disaster (bombing, flood, plane crash, volcano eruption, whatever) the entrant must specify a location (Ground Zero) for the Disaster. All deaths from the Disaster must occur within a 50 mile radius of the specified Ground Zero. Ground Zero may be specified in three ways: the Latitude & Longitude coordinates (the preferred method); a City or Place name (the city-center location is used for a large metropolitan area); or a Country name (the City Center of the Administrative Capitol is used as Ground Zero). For "deep" objects (bodies of water, valleys, depressions, canyons, etc. --- eg: the "Pacific Ocean") the deepest point is designated as Ground Zero; for "tall" objects (mountains, towers, etc.) the highest point on the object is Ground Zero. Moveable objects (such as airplanes), enveloping entites (such as "the ionosphere") or "outer space" are excluded as Disaster locations unless they have a unique name (eg:. the "International Space Station", the "Popemobile" or "Princess Cruise Liner Poseidon") that describes a bounded space/volume.

    Each occurrence of an entrant's Big Disaster will score 5 points. Multiple occurrences of a specified Disaster may be scored by the entrant provided that they occur no more frequently than once in any 168 hour time period.

  16. Although any team worldwide may submit an entry, the Audit Committee reserves the right to limit the number of contest entrants to previous contest entrants and a limited number of new participating entrants. For the 2002 Contest the anticipated limit will be fifty (50) total entrants.

  17. Participation in the contest is free. Contributions to our ongoing server disc space acquisition fund are appreciated. You are encouraged to nominate us to receive a MacArthur Foundation grant (yes, we recognize the irony in a bunch of morbid morons asking for a "genius" grant).
Required Entry Information
When submitting an entry be sure to include the following items in the listed order and separated by three blank lines.

  • The NAME of the team.

  • The names of all participants in the entry. Individuals may enter under a team name even though there is only a single member of the team.

  • The entrant's POP/SMTP-compliant Electronic Mail Address. For the 2002 contest year no attachments are anticipated but the account should be capable of receiving them without rejecting the attachment itself or the message that it is attached to. The E-mail account must remain active for the entire contest administrative period (December 1, 2001 through February 28, 2003). "Freemail" accounts are acceptable provided they meet these criteria.

  • The entrant's explicit release of embargo on the usage of the E-mail address in posted entrant identity information. The contest group mailings are done as "Blind Carbon Copies" so that E-mail addresses are not visible, even to other contest participants.

  • A preferred Mnemonic Identifier - in the listing of Victims & Their Selectors and Contest Standings each team is identified by a 2-to-4 character code.

    Please list a primary and several secondary preferred Mnemonic Identifiers. Identifiers must be formed according to specific rules. Also note the rules that determine who gets a disputed Identifier.

  • The entrant's predicted Big Disaster (nature of event & Ground Zero).

  • The entrant's list of potential victims of the Grim Reaper, in alphabetic order, ordered on the victim's last name. Victim Names should be on a separate line; biographical information should be on the line following the victim name. Separate the listing of each victim from the others by two blank lines.

    Failure to alphabetize your list will hamper compilation. The Audit Committee reserves the right to reject entries that are chaotically organized or unreadable (turn off HTML if you are using Web-TV or recent Microsoft mail clients).

    Victim lists submitted as attachments to the main body of the E-mail message are DOA ... Deleted On Arrival!


Audit Committee
An Audit Committee consisting of the website owner & two contest entrants formulate and interpret contest rules. If you would like to serve on the 2002 Audit Committe nominate yourself in an E-mail message separate from your entry «and» have another 2002 Contest Entrant second your nomination. Audit Committee membership will be based primarily upon maximum coverage of the media list for notability.

2002 Contest: | Entrants | Kills | Misses | Most Popular | Rules | Standings | Victims |