It’s Easter weekend, and being public service employees we get 4 (and 1/2 – as the Uni gives us a bonus leave!) days off. So we’re heading out for a few days of autumnal rest and relaxation. Which is a bit odd, because usually we think of Easter as being a spring thing, when we can expect the snow to be melting, and maybe some early flowers coming up (April showers bring May flowers… except in Oz, where things bloom at weird times and people think that Easter is the onset of winter).

Not being Christians, we don’t actually know of any better Easter songs for the title of this post than the one we chose. And that leads us to the point of this post.

Knowing what this is can be very valuable to you. Read on...

This weekend, we are celebrating the one year anniversary of this blog! And many of you have probably noticed that the titles are sometimes brilliant, sometimes stupid, sometimes cryptic. They at least make sense to Dan…but he is a bit weird. Many of them come from this idiot’s taste in music. So to mark this anniversary, we are having a contest. Unfortunately, to win, you have to get inside the head of a moron…we want you to explain where some of the titles come from [Lisa edit: Good luck! I’ve lived with the man for years and still can’t figure out how – if? – his brain works].

Here’s the basics: of the 93 posts so far, the titles of 38 of them (including this one) are music related. Sometimes it is as easy as a title, sometimes a pun on a title, or sometimes a lyric. To make it a bit easier for you, 24 are titles/puns, and 15 are lyrics.  Your mission, should  you accept it, is to tell us: 1) which 39 posts we are thinking of; 2) what the song was (for 24 of them, that is quite obvious); and 3) the name of the artist.

If you pick Marie Osmond as the performer for one of the songs, you won't get a point. She may (or may not) have done a version of one, but it isn't the one you are thinking of.

Scoring: For the easy ones that are just a title/variation of a title, each correctly answered question gets  you one point. There are a couple of tricky ones, but really not too hard. For ones that involve lyrics, there is bonus point for each one. We’ll give you an example (using a real answer, but one we gave away in the post): if you say that the post Capital Radio was named after the Clash’s song Capital Radio, you get 1 point (you must identify both title and artist).  Easy. Everyone can have one point without thinking! It’s our Easter gift to you. The lyric ones are a bit tougher. For example, for the current post that you are reading, if you properly identify the song the lyrics are from and the artist, you will get two points.

In total, there is a possible total of 54 points.

Some rules though. As we said, you have to be inside the moron’s head to win…so if you correctly identify a song but have the wrong artist, you don’t get any points. No part points – it is all or nothing.  And if you come up with something we don’t know, no bonus points, sorry. Happily, Lisa (the sane one of the duo – unless you count the cats, who are also less moronic than Dan) will tabulate scores and decide on the winning submission. Being a professor, she’s got a keen sense of fairness in marking assignments like this one; but, she’s also a hardass, so you need to be sure that you have all of your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed.

There are a couple of very tricky questions in this contest. This is the answer to one of them. Or another one...

The winner will be the person who gets the most points. Simple! In the case of a tie, whoever was first to submit their list, wins. To enter, put your answers into a Word doc (or Excel spreadsheet or something similar) and email it as an attachment to waggadventure@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is Monday 23 April 8am Australia EST (that’s Sunday 22 April 4pm MT, 6pm ET in Canada). Pay attention to these instructions; again, Lisa’s a hardass marker!

Now, the best part: why would you do this?  Because there is a great prize!  Or more accurately, a choice of prizes. There is only one winner, but you get to choose your prize.

Here’s what we are offering:

Dan remembers a lot of really useless crap, including this horrible band from the 1970s that he used to hear on CFOS. However, though he heard them in Ontario, they were Australian.

Option One: For an international winner who we know, personally, we will 1)  pay for 3 nights accommodation for you and one traveling companion in any city in Australia if  you come to visit us.  We will, of course, be there too!  And we will also take you and your companion to dinner at one of Wagga’s best restaurants when you are here. There is no expiration date on this, so you can win now and collect any time. And it is also transferable…so, for instance, someone can pass it along to a child, friend or parent (as long as we know them, and like them… we don’t want to spend time with any dweebs).

Option Two: For an Australian winner, someone we don’t know, or someone who won’t be coming to Australia, we will put together a huge prize package of every bit of Wagga and other local town memorabilia we can find and mail it to you. So you will get things like a Wagga wine cooler bag, an apron from the Junee Licorice and Chocolate Factory, whatever we can round up. Depending on where you are, we will either mail it from here or post/hand deliver when we are next in Canada. If you are an Australian we know, we will also throw in dinner anywhere in Wagga if you happen to be in town.

Speaking of the 70s, knowing what this is might be useful.

(For accuracy, if you win as an ‘international’ but when you come to collect you don’t plan on leaving for a long time, we will still consider you international and you get to choose Option One. Not many people fall into this category…you know who you are).

And then there is the bonus question!  If the winner is an international person who chooses option one, and can guess within 10 points (high or low) the number of hits we have had on the blog in the first year, they also get dinner at a great restaurant in whatever city they choose to claim the accommodation prize. If this is somewhere like Sydney or Melbourne, that means probably something owned by Neil Perry… This is an amazing bonus deal! Trust us…we’re foodies. And there might be some sort of concessional prize for an Australian who answers this correctly…we’ll negotiate something.

There's a theme song for where this image is from, but that wouldn't be a correct answer. Lisa will give bonus points for someone who explains this photo though.

So have fun trying to answer this quiz. As for how we are celebrating Easter (while you slave over this to win a fabulous prize), we are off to what we have been told is one of the nicest places to visit in the region. We will report back in the next couple of posts. But for now, all we will say is that though there will be some healthy active parts (we’re taking our bikes) it will 4 days of decadence, a lot of wineries, and even a brewery or two. My sins are my own, and they belong to me.