How I Met Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat, on the Web

I learned in Sunday school to simply “ask and you shall receive”. But in my wildest dreams, I would never have guessed that Sacha Baron Cohen, filmstar of Borat, would contribute to my website www.funnyphotoscontest.com . Not only that, even though we were total strangers having, just met on www.myspace.com, he easily agreed to my requests without any reservation. Can you believe that??

“Come on now,” you’re thinking -- myspace.com where kids, imposters and predators lurk. Surely, Sacha Baron Cohen does not frequent that website. But, as a matter of fact, he does. And it is I, not Baron Cohen, who is the imposter.

It all began on Dec. 12, 2006, my Mother’s 89^th birthday. My sister and I treated Mom to lunch and a movie. Mom wanted to see “Happy Feet”, a movie about dancing penguins. But my sister suggested the new, widely talked about film, “Borat.” Although, it wasn’t really Mom’s kind-of-movie, she was a good sport and a few parts did make her laugh.

Late that evening, when I turned on my computer to work on my website, www.funnyphotoscontest.com, I took a short break to read the comments, on www.myspace.com about Borat. To my complete surprise and sheer delight Sacha Baron Cohen, himself, had only minutes earlier posted the following message.

“Hit or miss, you tell me......

all feed back is welcome here, i dont care if you didnt enjoy it, but tell me why???
Was is good ? what was your favourite bit in the film ????

Do you want to see BRUNO the movie, it's in the pipeline as we type !!!!
i will try and reply to all msg's - promise x Sbc x”

This was just too incredible!!! I was so excited that I just had to respond. After all, how often does one get to chat with a real live movie-star?

Now, I must first tell you about my experience, a few years ago, with myspace.com. I was curious about this website that attracted millions of kids, but allowed only members to view all its features. No problem I thought, I’ll simply pose as my grandson, Jacob. Thus, I registered and poked around a bit, but never returned -- until a few months ago. I heard I could generate traffic to my own website, by mingling with all the folks on myspace.com as many adults now surf the site. Sounded good to me. So I created a profile, placed a few funny photos on the page, invited other members to create a caption for the photos and promised to post the best ones.

But, back to Sacha. Assuming, he might sign out any minute, I quickly wrote him the following message, clicked the send button, and then thought to myself, “For heaven’s sake, what chutzpah (guts) you’ve got”. I couldn’t believe what I had done.

“Saw your film today....verrrrrry funny.

Would love to have you create captions for the photos on my page.

Thanks,

PS - Happy Hannuka with lots of latkes”

Of course, I felt embarrassed to sign my own name. After all, the myspace.com community saw me as Jacob. Thus, I ended my message with a simple thanks. What else could I do? How ironic! In the days that followed many people asked me, “How do you know it’s really him?” But, in all truth I was the one, not Sacha, posing as someone else, my grandson Jacob. And Sacha Baron Cohen, not suspecting any ruse, graciously replied.

“Happy Hanukkah to you too, glad you liked the movie, would be more than happy to make a comment for your captions, but cant until we become friends, so you know what to do !!!”

Although, I didn’t know what to do, I figured it out and Sacha created the caption, “Nose hair takes a turn for the worse.” Wow…this was so thrilling. I could hardly wait until morning to tell everyone I knew. And maybe, just maybe…Sacha Baron Cohen could help promote my website !!!

Learning as I Go

Wise businessmen and businesswomen, obtain an education and experience before they ever consider beginning a new business. But then no one has ever accused me of being a “wise woman.” And so I dove head first into my website and have had to “learn as I go.”

Within in the first ten days of launching www.FunnyPhotosContest.com, I quickly discovered that trouble lay ahead and my first lesson was about to begin. During the planning stages, we (my grown children and I) had to establish dates for the two monthly contests. As four months of the year have only 30 days and seven months have 31 days, leaving February with only 28 or 29, we had no choice but to set the "last day" of the month as the ending date of the second contest. Thus, the 1^st of the month and the 15^th logically became the start dates of the two contests.

No problem…right? Wrong. A few days before the 14^th, the end of the first contest, I suddenly realized these dates presented a big problem. The first contest of the month would end at midnight on the 14^th, and the next would begin IMMEDIATELY!!! Good grief, when would I make the transition from one contest to the next. I needed time to remove the photos from the first contest, upload the new photos, and post the winners?

As a result, I had no choice for that first contest, but to carry my laptop computer to bed on the 14^th and set my alarm clock for midnight. Luckily, I organized everything carefully so that the process took only about 10 minutes. However, this was obviously not a pattern I wanted to continue. I needed a day for production between the two contests. And so, the new dates became the 2^nd to the 15th and the 17^th to the end of the month. Although, not as neat and tidy as the 1^st and 15^th, the dates appealed to me much more than an ongoing midnight rendezvous with my computer.

Although I solved my first lesson quickly and easily enough, I knew this would not be my last -- more likely, only the beginning.

Claiming the Contest Prize

The first time it happened, I could not imagine why in the world the winner would not reply to my email to receive her $50 prize. Before sending her a check from www.funnyphotoscontest.com, she had to verify her mailing address. So why wouldn’t she respond? But when it happened a second and third time with other winners, it finally occurred to me that the recipient’s email program had probably filtered out my message as Spam.

When I initially opened my email account, funnyphotoscontest@gmail.com, it never occurred to me that it had all the markings of “junk” email. But the word contest most likely looks like some company offering a bogus chance to win something for nothing. As for the word photo, it could possibly imply a pornographic site. Although this might not be the explanation, I decided it would be wise to change my email address.

But, the problem persisted. Although many winners immediately answer the email that lets them know they won, several others don't respond at all. Thus, creating a new email had solved only part of the problem. Luckily, I learned by sheer coincidence that the words I typed in my subject line, “congratulations” or “your photo won”, may also cause the Spam filters to reject the emails I sent.

Now that I’m using a new email address and simply typing “your entry” in the subject line, I’m hoping I can lay the problem to rest. But you never know with computers. Humans are suppose to be smarter, yet with all this frustration and with all the hair I’m pulling out of my head, it won’t be long before I’ll have to purchase a wig !

"Who's Winning"

It’s the 17^th of the month with all the excitement of a new contest (new ones start on the 2^nd and the 17^th of each month). And on those dates the hits to my site, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com, double or even triple. What causes the flurry of activity you might ask? The answer is very simple. Not only are the new photos posted, but viewers flock to the site to vote for their favorite.

Actually, there’s a little more to the story. During every contest, there is usually one or two Mom’s who are filled with anticipation and are anxious for their child’s photo to win. As a result, they flood their favorite forums and their friend’s email with a request to vote for their photo. And the recipients eagerly respond by voting and telling others to vote as well.

Although voting makes the contest thrilling (with current results posted every few days), it does give computer “savvy” photographers an advantage. Thus, to level the “playing field”, votes (although very important) do not by themselves determine the winner. As stated in the contest rules, “the contest winner will be selected by the FunnyPhotosContest Judges from the FIVE photos that receive the most votes.”

Above is the photo receiving the most votes at this writing.

Funny Photos Contest

It seemed like a perfect hobby for retirement. Little did I ever dream that www.FunnyPhotosContest.com would take over my life. In fact, it started out simply enough as a photo contest on the Internet for funny or cute photographs. For a small fee contestants could enter cute or funny photos. With a new contest every two weeks and viewers voting for their favorite picture, a photographer could win $50. In addition, twice a year, the 12 winning photos from the previous six months would be judged and the winner would receive an additional $500 grand prize bonus. With my two grown children as consultants, we were ready to launch our website.

No problem…except only a few days before the contest “went live” we realized that as an unknown site, web surfers may not want to pay our entry fee. Why would they, when the web abounds with numerous free photo contests? Thus, we removed the fee and prepared to pay the prize money ourselves. So much for my hobby, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com had just become a business. To make matters worse, my children and I had no experience operating a website business. Nevertheless, we decided to proceed and simply plunged in.

As novices in the website business world, we had a lot to learn, how to advertise the site to attract viewers, how to obtain sponsors to cover the cost of the prizes, and how to increase our position on the search engines like Google and Yahoo, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Although, we started six months ago, www.FunnyPhotosContest.com is still “a work in progress” and is evolving as we go along. Fortunately, we have received hundreds and hundreds of fascinating photos and have attracted many wonderful and loyal followers. Although my hobby has changed to a business, it’s a lot of fun and I have no complaints.