I am living proof that you can win from Marlboro contests. I have been very fortunate to have won an assortment of fantastic prizes for smoking Marlboro's. Anyone who doubts that these contests can really be won should read this article- it will change your opinion rather quickly.
In 2005 I was a guest at the Marlboro Ranch in Clyde Park Montana. When the announcement came about winning an all expense paid trip I of course was in doubt and shock. This trip really is the adventure of a lifetime! We were flown out to Montana, all expenses paid. We received luggage and phone cards before the trip as well as a generous check for $1500.
When we arrived at the Marlboro Ranch we were shocked to find an assortment of fantastic gifts awaiting us in our room. Walking in to find such a gorgeous room with all of these gifts was like being a kid on Christmas morning. We received Vivitar digital cameras, ashtrays, cigarettes, North face boots, a backpack, memory cards for our cameras, gloves, hats, expensive French sunglasses, Columbia sportswear coats, cookbooks, picture frames long johns and so much more!
After our stay at the ranch we received a lovely set of heavy duty coffee cups. I have no idea why these were sent to me.
A few months ago I tried my hand at winning another trip to the Marlboro Ranch during one of their contests. Unfortunately I did not win the trip to the ranch, but I did get a great pair of wireless headphones which were valued at nearly $100.
In addition to these prizes I have also received a really great Coleman sleeping bag, a pair of bronze dice, several really nice ashtrays and a barbecue set that included spices and seasonings as well as a marinating brush.
Marlboro offers an assortment of promotions and sweepstakes every year. In my opinion they are definitely worth entering because you very well could win a great prize or the trip of a lifetime! You can't win if you don't participate! What do you have to lose asides from an opportunity to win the trip of a lifetime!
Smoking might be bad for you, but at least Marlboro is willing to reward customers for their loyalty. It is really exciting to check your mail and find a package from Marlboro because you just never know what is inside, but you know it is going to be something great and worth writing home over!
Only two bird watchers in history have ever seen more than 8,000 of the approximately 9,600 species of birds found on our planet. Phoebe Snetsinger, of Missouri, was one of the two. Her father, Leo Burnett, was the ad exec who helped bring the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, Toucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger into our lives. Why is that important when discussing a birder? Easy: money! Only 900 species are found in the US and Canada, so a serious birder needs to have enough dough to travel around the world.
To give you some perspective on just what an fantastic accomplishment seeing 8,000 birds is, consider this:
Only 250 or so people have ever hit the 5,000 mark. Only 100 people have made it to 6,000 and only 12 or so have seen more than 7,000. In addition to money, serious birding requires time and strict adherence to the rules. There are birders who’ve been blacklisted for cheating and others that have fought over what actually constitutes a sighting (some birders say if you “hear” a bird, you’ve seen it.)
Phoebe Snetsinger (with a name like that, you’re a born birder, eh?) only became a serious bird watcher after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months to live. It’s quite possible that counting, or listing as it’s sometimes called, actually helped her beat that diagnosis; she lived not just another year, but another 17 years! And she would have lived longer, no doubt, were birding not such a dangerous hobby. Yes, on top of the financial independence and time, one also needs a certain amount of courage to trek into the wild, deep into jungles and forests of enormous size.
In 1999, on a birding trip to Madagascar, as she prepared to see her 8,500th bird, Snetsinger was killed in a freak car accident in the middle of nowhere. So, in the end, cancer didn’t do her in, but her obsessive hobby did.
Not that many moons ago, if you asked an ornithologist how many species of birds there were, s/he would have said about 6,000. Five years from now, they expect there will be more like 18,000. It’s not that birds are evolving, it’s more that we’re changing our definitions of what we call a species. Who knows how many of those 18,000 Snetsinger could have crossed off her list.
Any serious birders out there? How many have you counted? What’s your best birding story?
Ayrton Senna On The Very Edge
Bereft of Honda power yet still supernaturally fast, Senna here is zooming for his record-breaking sixth and last win at the 1993 Monaco Grand Prix.
We may be able to see a beautiful integrity in the uncompromising and dauntingly competent stance of today’s cars, wide and low and sticky with rubber, clean and complex as a surgical theatre, a blare in the ears and a blur in the eyes and a fireproofed gauntlet flung in the face of relevance.
L. J. K. Setright’s words from his 2002 book Drive On!: A Social History of the Motor Car read as if written specifically to subtitle Senna’s driving.
The year is 1993, the season is still early, and after his win in Monaco, Senna would be leading his great rival Alain Prost in the championship. No longer teammates as during the tumultuous end of the 80s under Ron Dennis at McLaren, Prost would strike back with four wins in a row, enough to earn his fourth world title and deny Senna his.
The McLaren, armed with a Ford instead of a Honda in the rear, is a focused blur of Marlboro colors, taking a corner with no margin left to spare.
No wonder, as it was on this very circuit five years earlier that Ayrton Senna experienced and described the sensation of flow, that peculiar mental state where a person’s skills and challenges are in perfect harmony:
I was already on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel, but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit, but still able to find even more.
Described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, my fellow Hungarian with the rather impossible name, flow is a precarious state of mind, prone to disruption by self-awareness, and rather frightening to comprehend from any other state of mind, as Senna himself learned during his pole run in Monaco:
Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove slowly back to the pits and I didn’t want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I was well beyond my conscious understanding. It happens rarely but I keep these experiences very much alive inside me because it is something that is important for self-preservation.
Self-preservation would elude him. At the much-maligned 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, 343 days after his last win in Monaco, Ayrton Senna crashed into a concrete wall and died.
Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport
Send an email to Peter Orosz, the author of this post, at peter@jalopnik.com.
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