The Monkey Dance (DonorsChoose Incentives)

First and foremost, thank you to everybody who has donated to my DonorsChoose challenge this year. At the time of this writing, we've raised just over $1,700, temporarily good enough for first place on the ScieceBlogs leader board.

If you haven't contributed yet, we've got lots of incentives to try to get you to contribute. In addition to the various incentives I described this weekend, the Corporate Masters are once again raffling off prizes ranging from magazine subscriptions to an iPod Touch. Janet has the details.

If even that's not enough, I said back at the beginning of this that I would offer some sort of big incentive for reaching the full challenge goal of $6,000. I got a couple of good suggestions, but you can blame Scalzi for the winner:

If my challenge gets $6,000 in donations, I'll dance like a monkey, and post video of it.

This would be fairly amusing, I'm sure, as 1) I can barely dance like a human (save for the wedding shuffle), and b) I have no idea what the Monkey Dance would actually look like. I feel pretty safe making the offer, though, because there's almost no chance of the challenge reaching $6,000.

Feel free to try to prove me wrong, though. And, just because I know somebody will suggest it, here's some appropriate YouTubery:

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I have to say, I had no idea that offering to dance like a monkey would be quite so appealing. Apparently, though, it's a big hit-- John Scalzi proclaimed it "the comedy highlight of 2008." This, from a year featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. In the two days since Scalzi's post, donations have…

ROFLmeow!

By Mad Hussein LO… (not verified) on 15 Oct 2008 #permalink

I have danced with John and he holds dear the dictum, "Dance like nobody's watching." The man is *awesome*. Post a video of *him* dancing like a monkey. Or maybe he'll give you lessons.

MKK

I feel all special, because my comment connected the dots. Nothing like being the first to state the obvious. My sense of responsibility has driven me to donate, so I guess that is good.

Good luck!

I donated to the Florida project, since I figure it's the state most in need of people familiar with the real world.