And the winner is...

Growing season is short, here in Minnesota. The "safe" date after which frost and snow are only unlikely but not impossible is May 15, meaning we put in an intensive weekend on the yard and garden, which in turn means that by the time I got around to judging the results of the 5/8/09 Friday Challenge last night I was too tired to think clearly.

Normally that wouldn't stop me from writing or shooting off my mouth, of course, but this time I decided it would be a closer simulation of "fair" if I put off picking a winner until this morning. The delay didn't change a thing, though. This morning, while I'm considerably more wide-awake, my hands still feel like claws, my back still hurts in places I'd forgotten I had, and the results are still the same.

Torainfor, you've written another sparkling and clever bit of brilliance that disappointed me only because it was over too soon. Passinthrough, I really enjoy these peeks into your world, because it's so very different—in an appealing way—from mine. My high school reunion experience was more like Jamsco's. I graduated from a high school that was bigger than the state college I went to for my freshman year, and at the front-end alphabetically of a class of nearly a thousand. So yes, while our class did produce a goodly number of doctors, lawyers, politicians, and professors, as well as two authentic rocket scientists, we also produced a lot of folks who fit that old punchline: "No, not Penn State. State pen."

Henry—I'll get back to you on this. Al, you got really close. How did you ever find out that I always considered Woz the real wizard, not Jobs? To wring all that performance out of an 8-bit 6502 with a measly 64KB of addressable memory—

I'm sorry; I'm drifting off into geek-speak. The final upshot is that The Bandit is this week's winner, with an absolutely delightful little tale-with-a-twist about the J. Moriarty High School 10-year class reunion. Very clever, you diabolical fiend!