Andrew Coulson once apologized for having referred to Toronto as the capital of Canada, asking me to apologize on his behalf to our Prime Minister, Tim Horton*.
Actually Tim Horton was a hockey player who was killed in an auto accident several decades ago, but who started some doughnut/coffee outlets which have become massively franchised throughout Canada, expanding into some areas of the US.
One of the very most successful marketing campaigns in the history of the universe has to be the Tim Horton's "Roll Up the Rim to Win" contest, referred to as "The Tim Horton's Lottery" by many of my colleagues. For a little over a month each spring, Tim Hortons dispenses its coffee, etc. in cups that look like this one:
As you can see from these three photos of a cup, in this year's version of the contest, Tim Hortons is giving away up to 30 vehicles, up to a hundred big-screen plasma tvs, thousands of Ipods, some cash, and millions of "free" coffees and donuts. One year in a slightly ironic twist of fate, my vegetarian son, David Ricardo Palmer, won a barbecue.
Most people do not use their thumbs to push up the rim of the cup to see if they won anything; instead they just hook their lower teeth under the rim, usually starting on the left arrow, and pull up the rim with their teeth — it's much easier.
The odds of winning something are about one in nine. Alternatively, the odds of not winning, as happened with the cup in the above photographs, are about 8/9.
This year I went 0 for 25 in the lottery, not winning any coffee or doughnuts or anything in the first 25 cups of coffee I bought. I figured that must be pretty unusual (but, no, I did not become paranoid and assume a conspiracy against me, though I do know that Tim Hortons has admitted to scattering the prizes based not just on population but also on geographic dispersion so that people from less populated provinces have a slightly higher chance of winning big prizes). It turns out that there's about a 1 in 20 chance of someone going 0 for 25 in this lottery (8/9 to the 25th power), so it isn't all that rare.
One year, I noticed that people seem to have lots of fun playing the Tim Hortons Lottery; they smile, they joke, they talk pleasantly while waiting in line. So my son and I constructed an arch, "The Arch of Anonymous Losers", to celebrate this version of the Myth of Sisyphus. More about this arch can be seen here. It was a part of art displays at two different art galleries (one a juried show) and now resides, in sections in the loft of my garage.
*The capital of Canada is Ottawa and the current Prime Minister is Stephen Harper (remember this cartoon last year?).
