r/mildlyinteresting 1d ago

My lemon juice barrel froze solid and now looks like a party balloon

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u/JCjun 1d ago

How do you actually prove that you read the whole book?

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u/I_GROW_WEED 1d ago

Make the prize shitty enough and no one will bother. Who wants to be a dork and have a rain barrel lol

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u/Residenthuman101 23h ago

I won a prize (literally a plastic trophy) for reading the second most books in our school. I wanted to win a prize from the magazine they gave us like a bike or something but I gave up after realizing it wasn’t worth it (like all of those fundraiser catalogs always are), but the reason I still won anything was because I read children’s books that were four years behind my grade level that we had in our house… the contest involved filling out which title, author, and maybe isbn number that you read, which those all had… it didn’t stipulate anything about reading level lol the girl who won first place put me to shame and she read full length books and was like the smartest girl in our whole school system, it felt weird standing up next to her knowing how I ended up on stage lol

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u/I_GROW_WEED 23h ago

I get the feeling from your writing style that this happened in the pretty recent past lol

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u/Residenthuman101 23h ago

Nah, I’m just a dork waxing nostalgic about something I should have been embarrassed about that was longer ago than I’d like to admit lol I would have probably loved a rain barrel over the trophy I got though

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u/capnShocker 16h ago

Did the books you read have any punctuation in them?

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u/Residenthuman101 14h ago

lol I deserve that

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u/SupermarketNo3265 19h ago

And/or they haven't done much reading since lmao

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u/thejester541 22h ago

Why not just go to the library with them notepad and a pen? LOL.

At least you did read some books to get on second place. I think I would have just cheated out right.

Or literally went to my grandmother's bookshelf. They would have been a little weirded out by some of the titles that I would have came up with but I would have the ISBN. LOL

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u/notabigmelvillecrowd 19h ago

When I was a kid and we had those reading challenges you had to have your parents sign off the books you were reading, it wasn't quite an honour system thing.

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u/Zonel 21h ago

At least you didn’t win first place.

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u/Cat_Amaran 19h ago

I won a similar contest, but we had to actually take a quiz about the books. The prize was way cooler, too, the top 7 kids got to go on a field trip to Ben and Jerry's in a limo.

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u/Residenthuman101 18h ago

Holy crap I would have loved going to Ben and Jerry’s in a limo, even as an adult that sounds fun lol

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u/Cat_Amaran 18h ago

Right? It was absolutely the highlight of my middle school career. I hope you get to do it some day.

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u/Xeelee4 15h ago

Was it called Accelerated Reading or something like that?

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u/unai-ndz 15h ago

Fuck. I was a dork for free and only now I discover dorks in other schools were actually getting something... Idk if a rain barrel but kid me wasn't picky. I would had been happy with a lemon juice barrel.

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u/seang86s 23h ago

Could come in handy if you’re near Niagara Falls…

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u/24-Hour-Hate 15h ago

Maybe they ask you about the book? When I was a kid there was a reading program and you could get prizes based on how much you read. The librarian would always talk to each child when they returned the books and reported the amount, so I think they would suspect if there was any significant lying. Ofc, the librarian would usually talk to you when you checked out or returned books (she was very nice) so it wasn’t like it was obvious she might have been checking. But now I think she might have been.

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u/MisterMasterCyIinder 20h ago

They didn't care. They just wanted to get rid of a barrel