I'm back from Canada, bitches! (Don't all get up at once to welcome me back.) Good time, great food, great weather... it got up to a balmy 85 degrees at one point! But it's nice to go to America Jr. every once in a while, if only to underline the differences between American and Canadian cultures. Parallel populations, developing in only-somewhat-parallel manners. More on the trip at a later date (read: once I've forgotten about it).
Of the many differences I encountered last week, here's one I didn't come across. Apparently it's against the law in Canada to award contest prizes to someone who has won said contest without having performed some kind of "skill." Deadspin brought up a story of free golf clubs from Sports Illustrated not being distributed due to the requirement of a "skill testing question." Will assumed it was a gag, but it's not... it's the law. It has something to do with casinos and gambling, where you cannot win a prize without having The formality of a skill testing question is required on any sweepstakes or contest in which Canadian citizens participate.
What kills me is that the Canadian courts actually determined what constitutes sufficiently-tested "skill." Typically the question is a simple math problem, so the courts decided that the math problem has to have, at minimum, three operations in order to justify a prize. I guess figuring out "1263527653 mod 237647" or the square root of 12374612347861293874628374 isn't skillful, but "2 + (2 x 2) - 2" is.
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