It’s time to announce the win­ners of The Tricky Ques­tions Con­test! First of all, thanks to all of you who par­tic­i­pated. I had to mod­er­ate the com­ments for a while because some smart Eng­lish guy (Wapen­take, yes, it’s you!) got most of the answers right only a few min­utes after pub­lish­ing the post.

Remem­ber: the ques­tions were:

1. Travel: What is a chicken bus?
2. Gen­eral knowl­edge: when I first came to Canada, I noticed a lot of stores would have an height stick on the front door frame. What are these for?
3. Food: what would a typ­i­cal French per­son have for breakfast?
4. Enigma: when I was in Aus­tralia, I noticed some pub­lic bath­rooms (i.e in Syd­ney train sta­tion) were lit with blue light, like in a disco (ultra­vi­o­let). I really won­dered why at the time and found the answer a few months later in a book. So, why would there be blue lights in a pub­lic bath­room in your opinion?
5. Vocab­u­lary: what’s the com­mon point between the words: “toonie“; “double-double” and “zed“?

So here are the first answers I got, by Wapen­take:

1) For­mer US school buses, loudly dec­o­rated, in Cen­tral Amer­ica, often trans­port­ing as many barn­yard ani­mals as people.

2) So wit­nesses to a rob­bery can accu­rately judge the height of the miscreants.

3) A long cough­ing fit fol­lowed by a cou­ple of cig­a­rettes? And maybe a bread roll, lump of jam, and a cof­fee. I think cereal is on the rise as well.

4) Sup­pos­edly deters addicts by mak­ing it harder to locate a juicy blue vein. Unless they run a marker pen down it before­hand of course.

5) Cana­di­anisms?

The teacher says… 5/5!

The sec­ond entry I received was from Saskboy, who said:

# A dec­o­rated school type bus, that can trans­port both peo­ple and cargo like live­stock (chickens).

# For clerks to notice the height of rob­bers as they leave the store.

# Food and drink

# The blue lights are so junkies can’t see their veins.

# They are Cana­dian pro­nun­ci­a­tions of things and stuff.

Nice! The teacher says… 4/5!

In between, I got answers from Julian Webb by email (3.5÷5), Jay Cam (1÷5), Linguist-In-Waiting (3÷5) and Erik (2÷5). Nice try guys, but it took a smart woman to answer almost everything!

Theresa com­mented last:

1. A chicken bus is an Amer­i­can school bus, that’s been col­or­fully painted, and is used in Guatemala to trans­port peo­ple (and ani­mals, hence the name) from vil­lage to village.

2. I’m guess­ing it’s some sort of snow gauge.

3. Cof­fee and bread (baguette) with but­ter and/or jam.

4. The blue light makes it hard for peo­ple to see their veins, so this makes it more dif­fi­cult for heroin users to inject themselves.

5. They are all words that are used in Cana­dian Eng­lish and are not used in U.S. Eng­lish. (I would say they are uniquely Cana­dian, but zed is used in Eng­land too)
Toonie: The two dol­lar Cana­dian coin
Double-double: A cof­fee with two creams and two sug­ars.
Zed: The last let­ter of the alphabet.

She got 4/5 but she also called a wild­card and blogged about this con­test: North­ern Expo­sure. So she is one of the winner!

So here are our three win­ners: Wapen­take, Saskboy and Theresa. Con­grats! Email me a 100×100 or 125×125 pic­ture of your blog, or some­thing designed to pro­mote you and I’ll put it in the ad slots for a month.

As promised, I also picked a 4^th con­test to win a one month blogroll link and a short blog review. To pick the win­ner, I just rolled a dice and got a two. Com­menter num­ber 2 was… Ghosty! Con­grats! Don’t miss his com­ment at the bot­tom by the way, it’s hilar­i­ous!

Ghosty, author of Agents Don’t Do House­work, is a very spe­cial man secret agent. Not your reg­u­lar Joe, unlike what he says under his “About Me” section.

A res­i­dent of Bal­ti­more, Ghosty is a polit­i­cal fundraiser — between us, this is prob­a­bly just a cover… espe­cially con­sid­er­ing he has been blog­ging since 2005! I mean, seri­ously, who has the time to main­tain a blog AND work??

I fell in love with this blog as soon as I saw it. The tem­plate is great and he really as this lit­tle “some­thing” to blog. He is also a sur­pris­ing man: he believes in Hin­duism, he talks about pol­i­tics (even though he says he doesn’t!) and cur­rent issues, he tried to blog for dol­lars but then recon­sid­ered the whole thing, and he also has this really cool project to start a blog about sounds in and around Bal­ti­more.

Basi­cally, read him! He has been one of my favorite for a while now. Def­i­nitely a gifted blog­ger and a great per­son to talk to.

That’s it folks… and thanks again for playing!

Related arti­cles:

1. The Tricky Ques­tions Con­test — Win Free Advertising!
2. The Ad-Spot Con­test Win­ners… Announced!
3. The Blog­ging Advice Winners!
4. State of the Blogosphere
5. Be The Blog­ger Peo­ple Read (3÷10)