You're A Winner!

I was Christmas shopping a month or so ago and I saw a board game at a local store. The game was called "The Self Esteem Game!" and the tag line was "The Game Where Everyone's A Winner!"

Horrible.

This is precisely what's wrong with the world today, and I don't mean the gratuitous use of exclamation marks, which is something else that's wrong with the world today. Because of course, everyone is decidedly not a winner. It's a lesson I've tried hard to teach my own sons. Unfortunately, they continue to beat me soundly at every game we've ever played in spite of my efforts to teach them to lose gracefully. I think they cheat.

Be that as it may, you of course are a winner, one of the rare few. And new for the Kansas City Irish Fest 2007, you'll have a chance to show those lesser mortals just what a big winner you are. Because we now have contests.

You'll be able to compete this year in three such tests of skill and artistry: baking, photography and knitting. Keeping in mind that this is Irish Fest, you've probably already figured out that we're not interested in your challah bread, your vacation pictures from France, or your woolen Andean poncho. However if you make the best Irish soda bread this side of Slievenamuck, we want you. If you've snapped that perfect image of O'Brien's Tower at the Cliffs of Moher or that freckled little girl in Gortahork, show us. If you knit jumpers that would keep a fisherman warm in the fiercest storm that ever blew in from Inishbofin, we need to see it.

Details on the contest and the great prizes that our hard working contest organizer Cami Travis-Groves has procured will be posted on the web site soon. In the mean time, start sifting, shooting and slipping.

Because you're a winner!!!