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POPSIs The Film 'An American Carol' Being Sabotaged At The Box Office? Obviously, this type of "error" sometimes requires collusion between employees--a way of marking the ticket so that you are sent to the correct theater, even though you've been sold the wrong ticket. Before anyone jumps to conclusions and chalks this up to politics, the fact is this is a fairly rare but not unheard of occurrence. There have been payola scandals in the past and it usually has more to do with either juicing the numbers for a big budget release or, more prosaically, lazy or incompetent ticket sellers at the theaters. Would I put it past Hollywood to collude with theater owners to depress sales of AAC? No, but in this case I think it best to use Occam's Razor - everything being equal, the simplest and least complicated answer is probably the right one. “Please email us a picture of your ticket stub to: fraud@americancarol.com
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POPS830! How a MA carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever Controversy erupts in the competitive Scrabble world as three world records are destroyed in one game by a pair of club amateurs. "If they weren't really trying to win," an intermediate-level player named Mike Eldeiry wrote on the Crossword Games-Pro message board, "then can we really consider it our record? Fun, yeah. Neat, sure. Promotable, why not? But record, ummmmmmmm, I don't know." Eldeiry told me the game reminded him of a 600-foot batting-practice home run. If experts always shot for the moon, he said, "I think they'd have cracked 850 by now. But they'd have lost a lot of games in the process." Maybe, but there definitely seems to be some sour grapes amongst the experts here. See the article for the play-by-play analysis.