A Whole Bunch of Fun Things - Bet

Howdy Ho everyone!

Your roving Border Collie Reporter, Bet, here!

Before the Musher spoiled all of the good news, I wanted to hog the blog and let you know of some fun things going on as the Curly Tails prepare for their 2012 Iditarod training!

First off, we've now opened dog sponsorship to EVERYONE!  Yep, its wide open, and hoo boy there's some good Curly Tails that need sponsorship!

This year, the sponsorship information is going to be on the blog because its easier for me to update, and I hate HTML coding... its murder on the crampy toes and I can never remember that "a href" thing (you geeks know what I mean).

So, all you have to do is look at the right side of the blog and see the cool buttons we made.  We have a gazillion categories to choose from, but the new ones are:
Sponsor an Active Training Pool Dog
Sponsor a Future Star
Sponsor a Past Star

I'll go into more detail in the upcoming days to explain the sponsorship stuff and things, because I know we have a LOT more fans than last year because of the Facebooking and Twitter thing, so I'll tell you all about how cool it is later.

The really really biggie news is that we're going to have a contest... SERIOUSLY!!!

As you can probably tell, following a 1,200 mile dog sled race has its challenges.  Its not like NASCAR (much to the Musher Guy's chagrin) and frankly having a whole bunch of dogs running around a large oval for 1,200 miles is pretty boring and downright messy.

The Iditarod trail is very long... and cold... and hilly... and icy... and moose-laden... probably has some sheepie things too.  For some reason they can't hire enough camerapeoples to stand there for 2 weeks and film all of the action.

In the past we've used various techniques to keep track of the Musher and the Pretty Curly Tails:

Then we came upon a lighter solution:

But the Princess said the ear tag hurt, so then we found the ultimate solution... it was called SPOT and it tracked her really good... unless she forgot it in the truck, or lost it on the trail, or forgot to reset it.  At one point we hid it in her food and she swallowed it, which worked all the way up to when... well, nobody wanted it back after that.

So we got a new one, but the company had made so many improvements to it, longer range, more precise pinpointing of locations, and an emergency distress beacon, easy bake oven, and headlamps, but for some reason she didn't want to swallow that one:

So we're reporting that we will not be providing free tracking of the Musher for the 2012 Iditarod... but that doesn't mean that you can't track the Musher!

We are recommending that if you want to get as much of the action as you want, that you subscribe to the Iditarod Insider.  You'll get behind the scenes updates, videos on demand, GPS tracking that comes with speed the teams are traveling, distances between teams and checkpoints, and temperatures on the trail.  The video even gets you live streaming ceremonial start, real start, and finish of the race.  Although we have some spies located around the course, you can't get any more action than what the Iditarod Insider gives you... and honestly that's really how I get some of my scoops (with really really insider info coming from our spies on the ground), and it'll keep you from spending the whole Iditarod doing this:

To make it even funner, we will be holding a contest.  Between right now (8 August 2011) and 11:50pm on 31 August 2011 Cartoonist time (Eastern US time), if you send an e-mail to the Musher Minions at help4northwapiti@gmail.com and tell us that you have subscribed to the Iditarod Insider, we'll post your names on the blogs as "Insiders" and you will qualify to win a prize straight from the Musher that is really cool and covered in Pretty Curly Tail fluff.  On 1 September 2011, all of the names of people who have subscribed will be put in a hat, and yours truly will pull one name out of that hat and the winner will get the cool prize.  So, not only will you get a front seat insider view of the Iditarod, but you may also win a prize!

That's it for now!!!

- Bet