[=SDC=] Announcement

This year's Summer Doldrums Comp (the eighth) will Totally Officially Commence in about two hours' time, with the first five questions. From tomorrow on, the questions will appear in two bunches of five each day until the supply is exhausted, which will be in about a week's time. The questions will only be posted on alt.usage.english. About half the questions have some relevance to the newsgroup, and all are copyright their authors.

What do you need to do well in the SDC? A little intelligence maybe, plenty of lateral thinking, good research skills (since although the questions have been "googleproofed", search engines are probably the only way to go about solving some of them) and a bit of teamwork. Sometimes there is more than one answer to a question, only one of which will be accepted, so some mind-reading abilities wouldn't go amiss.
As past participants will know, the setters are bona fide amateurs, so there is no guarantee that the questions are correctly worded or match the answers, but we've made some effort to inspect them so there's a good chance they're more or less okay. But if you see a question and think, "Given the way they've written it, there's no way the answer I have in mind can be right," try us! We've been shown up before and we'll be shown up again. No bonus sheep for so doing, however.
Most participants will be pleased to hear that the level of obscurity has gone down this year (and some of the questions are ridiculously easy) but since the panellists are all sadists, we provide no indication of which questions are easy and which are impossible. Solving impossible questions will do wonders for your sheep-count, though.
All (partial) answers, guesses, suggestions, requests for help, etc. should be posted in the thread of the relevant question. The sheep will be awarded by the panel to the first person to post what they consider to be acceptably close to the Totally Official Answer. If you're in competitive mood this year, copy your answers to (Email Removed), because that way we can more easily adjudicate between answers that are posted at approximately the same time.
All previous SDCs are available online at
http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2005/index.html; seeing what's gone on before will explain the format better than my ramblings.

Finally, if you have no interest in the competition, filter out all the messages that begin (=SDC=).
atb
Adrian, Totally Official Panellist
ps
Jerry will be along later to fill in the bits I've forgotten.