lost and frowned

Unclaimed items from the coat check of the apocalypse — found slides, comics, the infamous name-that-sidewalk contest, and more. An archive of a publication that has stopped.

name that sidewalk / fine print

The Fine Print

What follows is the complete set of terms and conditions governing the Name That Sidewalk contest. It began as eight items and was added to whenever a reader did something we had not anticipated, which was most months. By the seventh contest it had reached fifty-two.

Roughly a third of the list has nothing to do with the contest. That was not a decision anybody made. An item would be added in response to an actual event — a reader in a parking lot with a tape measure, a letter about a driveway — and the next one would be added because it occurred to us while we were in there. Nobody ever objected, and after a while readers began writing in to suggest additions of their own, which we declined to use and then used.

It was published in capitals because that is how terms and conditions were published, and it is reproduced in capitals here for the same reason. It has not been edited for length. It was never edited for anything else.

  1. ALL ENTRIES MUST BE RECEIVED BY AN UNCLEAR DEADLINE THAT CAN BE DETERMINED AND/OR CHANGED LONG AFTER THE FACT.
  2. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.
  3. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO REMOVE AND MAIL ACTUAL SIDEWALKS.
  4. LOST & FROWNED MAY NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY INJURIES CAUSED WHILE ATTEMPTING TO REMOVE AND MAIL ACTUAL SIDEWALKS.
  5. NEVER EAT YELLOW SNOW.
  6. ENTER AS OFTEN AS YOU LIKE.
  7. LIMIT TWO PER FAMILY.
  8. LUCKY GUESSES COUNT.
  9. THE JUDGES' DECISION IS FINAL, EXCEPT WHERE IT IS REVERSED.
  10. THE JUDGES ARE NOT ACCEPTING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE JUDGES.
  11. CAPRICORNS: TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO TRY SOMETHING NEW.
  12. SIDEWALKS MAY APPEAR SMALLER THAN ACTUAL SIZE.
  13. DECALS TEND TO VARY DEPENDING ON MODEL.
  14. A SIDEWALK IS NOT A DRIVEWAY. A DRIVEWAY IS NOT A SIDEWALK. A RAMP IS A MATTER FOR THE JUDGES.
  15. ALL PAVEMENT IS PAVEMENT SOMEWHERE.
  16. AT NO TIME WILL HINTS BE PROVIDED, OTHER THAN THE HINTS PROVIDED.
  17. WEATHER IS NOT A CLUE.
  18. WEATHER MAY VERY OCCASIONALLY BE A CLUE.
  19. CHEWING GUM IS NOT A LANDMARK.
  20. THE PHRASE "AROUND THE CORNER FROM THE OTHER ONE" IS NOT A GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION.
  21. DO NOT LITTER.
  22. KNEEL ONLY ON DRY PAVEMENT.
  23. AT NO TIME DOES LOST & FROWNED ALLOW THE USE OF PERSONAL SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHY EQUIPMENT TO IDENTIFY SIDEWALKS.
  24. DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH STRANGERS.
  25. DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH STRANGERS' PETS WITHOUT THE PET'S CONSENT.
  26. FOLLOW ARROWS WHERE APPLICABLE.
  27. SIDEWALKS THAT BECOME DISMANTLED DURING THE RUN OF A NAME THAT SIDEWALK CONTEST WILL BE DELETED FROM THE SITE AND REPLACED BY A MORE APPROACHABLE SIDEWALK.
  28. SOME SIDEWALKS HAVE BEEN REPAIRED SINCE PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARE NOW HARDER.
  29. REPEATING THE WORD "MUCH" 600-700 TIMES ALOUD MAY TEMPORARILY CAUSE THE WORD "MUCH" TO SEEM LIKE A MADE-UP WORD.
  30. DO NOT ATTEMPT THE PRECEDING ITEM IN PUBLIC.
  31. THE WORD "SIDEWALK" HAS ALSO BEGUN TO SEEM LIKE A MADE-UP WORD, AND WE HAVE ONLY OURSELVES TO BLAME.
  32. CORRECT ANSWERS RECEIVED SECOND ARE STILL CORRECT AND STILL SECOND.
  33. TIES WILL BE BROKEN BY WHICHEVER ENTRY ARRIVED FIRST, WHICH IS NOT A TIE.
  34. ODDS OF WINNING DEPEND ON THE NUMBER OF ENTRIES RECEIVED AND ON THE SIDEWALK.
  35. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ENTRIES LOST, DAMAGED, MISDIRECTED, OR THOUGHT BETTER OF.
  36. WINNERS MAY DONATE PRIZES TO CHARITY AND/OR NEARBY GARBAGE CAN.
  37. PRIZES ARE NOT TRANSFERABLE, ALTHOUGH NOBODY WILL BE WATCHING.
  38. CASH VALUE ONE TWENTIETH OF ONE CENT, WHICH IS ALSO THE VALUE OF THE PRIZE.
  39. BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. NOTHING IN THIS CONTEST REQUIRES BATTERIES.
  40. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.
  41. NO ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.
  42. SOME SETTLING OF EDITORIAL CONTENT MAY OCCUR DURING DOWNLOAD.
  43. PLEASE ALLOW FOUR TO SIX WEEKS, OR NINETEEN YEARS.
  44. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED.
  45. VOID WHERE ENCOURAGED.
  46. THIS CONTEST IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY MUNICIPAL DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS, AND THE REVERSE IS ALSO TRUE.
  47. EMPLOYEES OF LOST & FROWNED AND THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILIES ARE ELIGIBLE, THERE BEING NO EMPLOYEES.
  48. LOST & FROWNED RESERVES THE RIGHT TO BE DISAPPOINTED.
  49. ONE SIDEWALK PER SIDEWALK.
  50. IF THE PAVEMENT LOOKS FAMILIAR, IT PROBABLY IS.
  51. WHEN IN DOUBT, SAVE A BACKUP COPY.
  52. READ THE PRECEDING FIFTY-ONE ITEMS BEFORE ENTERING.

Editors' note. The contest these rules governed has been over for years. There is no deadline, unclear or otherwise, and there is nowhere to send anything. Item 1 was for a long time the only honest sentence on the page, and it has now become the truest one on the site.

We have kept the list because a great many people arrived at this magazine through it, read it to the end, and never went anywhere else here. It was linked from places that linked nothing else we published. It outperformed every column, both cats and all seven contests, and it did so without ever once being about anything.

And because the rules turned out to be considerably funnier than the contest they were written for. That was apparent by about the third month, and we kept running the contest anyway for another four years, partly out of obligation to the readers and partly because a set of terms and conditions governing nothing at all would have been a much weaker joke than a set governing something almost equally small. The contest existed to give the fine print a subject. We are aware of how that sounds.

The seven contests themselves are recorded in the results archive, and the method by which they were run is set out at how it was played. Item 5 stands.