There’s a reason for this post’s unusual headline: I’m doing some small scale googlebombing.
I’ll need to back up a little to explain…
I have a weakness for Doritos. Specifically, I have a penchant for the Cooler Ranch flavour which comes in the appropriately named “movie bag” sized packet.
Right now, Doritos are running a promotion in conjunction with Blockbuster. One in four packets of Doritos have scratchcards inside. On each of these scratchcards is a movie-related clue. To claim your prize of one free movie rental, you write down what you think the movie in question is, bring the card along to a Blockbuster outlet and one of the employees there will scratch the card to reveal the true answer.
That’s kind of a frightening thought, actually. What if you get it wrong? Will the guy behind the counter point and laugh at you?
“No, you idiot! Wrong, wrong, wrong!”
Anyway, I found one of these scratchcards in my movie bag. The clue was “Gladiator’s Stroke Of Genius”. My deductive powers led me to believe that the movie in question was A Beautiful Mind (Gladiator, Russell Crowe, genius… natch).
Still, I wasn’t 100% sure and with visions of possible humiliation at the hands of Blockbuster employees, I turned to the web for confirmation.
A Google search for the exact phrase returned nothing. I was on my own.
As it turned out, I was right. Instead of humiliation, I got a free movie for a night.
But it struck me that maybe I should get the ball rolling on using Google to the betterment of my fellow man. Hence, this entry.
A googlebot will hopefully spider this site sometime in the next week. When that happens, searching for the exact phrase “Gladiator’s Stroke Of Genius” should bring up this journal entry and I’ll be able to confirm the suspicions of my fellow Doritos munching, movie loving public.
I have no idea how many different scratchcards there are in those Doritos packets but, you never know, I might be helping somebody watch a movie for free.
(The T&Cs of the competition make no mention of what is or is not allowed once the prize has been claimed so I’m obeying the letter, if perhaps not the spirit, of the competition).
I claimed my prize of one night’s rental of Road To Perdition, just released on DVD. Very enjoyable it was, too.
Goes nicely with a bag of Doritos.
UPDATE: Check out this thread at Jessica’s site for more answers to the competition clues.