Winners!

At the beginning of summer Portland Parks and Rec buys space in the paper to advertise their free movies in the park.  They have an agreement with the movie distributors not to tell people the real names of the movies and instead publish a list of dates with movie names that are a play on the real titles.

Also every year, they have a contest offering the first people who decode all their movie names a prize.  This year, Matt and I entered the contest.  It took about an hour to un-puzzle them all, most of the time throwing names back and forth until one of us figured out what they were saying.  There were about three left when I finally broke down and we used Google. "We're looking for a movie with a mouse and a dog and a rake" and Matt typed in "mouse dog rake movie" and voila, the computer spit out the answer.

We sent off our list and after a week I figured we didn't win, but lo and behold, look what arrived in the mail today!  One free meal at Elmers (including drink.)  We won!

I would love to tell you the list of alternative movie titles, but I recycled the ad right after we finished the contest so I can't illustrate just how smart were were to decode them all (both with our brains and Google.)