Of cars, bakers and bloggers

At first sight, the three terms from the title have nothing in common. A careful scrutiny, however, reveals an intricate web of associations and logical connections.

As you already know from our blog entry aptly named Blog and win R300 every week, bidorbuy recently invited South African bloggers to guess the highest bid of the high-value items offered on the One Day, One Rand no-reserve auctions running on Thursdays. The VW Tena City had the honour to kick-off the Best Guess competition for the bloggers. Next week, bloggers will be tasked with best-guessing the winning bid for a VW Polo Hatch. By the way, the prize money remains the same: R300.

So far, so good. We have the explanation for both cars and bloggers.

But how did the bakers make their way into the title of this story?

Well, the bakers came in thanks to the entry posted by Mike in his Living in Jozi blog.

After duly placing his Best Guess for the bidorbuy competition, Mike happened to mention the Worldwide Blogger Bakeoff and said: “Should my guess at the closing bid in the auction be the closest and by some strange tear in the stitching of our universe, I win the monetary prize, I will donate it to the Blogger Bakeoff”.

A bit of investigation revealed that the Worldwide Blogger Bakeoff is an online campaign that challenges bloggers to get involved in a drive to alleviate poverty in Africa by baking a loaf of bread, blogging about it, and donating dough to Breadline Africa. For its part, Breadline Africa will use the money to convert used shipping containers into permanent structures that can serve as classrooms or as soup kitchens.

Amazingly enough, of all the bloggers who entered the bidorbuy Best Guess competition, Mike was the closet to the highest bid for the VW Tena Citi: his guess was only R867 off the winning amount of R66,600.

Upon learning that he had won, Mike’s comment was: that is a small miracle in itself!

Indeed it is. Luckily, there are no visible tears in the stitching of our universe. But there will be more “dough” in the bank for the Breadline Africa project!