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Liquid courage: Vitaminwater challenges fans to ditch smartphones for a year

WASHINGTON — Vitaminwater, made by Coca-Cola, is offering one lucky person the chance to win $100,000 by ditching their phones and tablets for a year. Anyone looking to participate can enter by tweeting or making an Instagram post.

If you want to enter, come up with a good explanation of how you would spend your year without a smartphone. Include the hashtags #nophoneforayear and #contest. For more information about the contest, visit the rules page. Those who are interested can only enter four times. The rubric for deciding the winner is as follows: Creativity and originality – 30 percent, Cultural or brand relevance of submission – 30 percent, Humor – 30 percent and Quality of the submission (spelling and grammar count here!) 10 percent. The contest opened on December 11 and runs through January 8. At that point submissions will be reviewed and a winner will be chosen. People have already submitted their ideas on how they would spend their phone-free year. Some recurring themes: exploring the outdoors, spending more time with family and using the money they would save from paying for a phone to pay other bills.  

 

Spring weather brings smelly side effect: Stink bugs on the move

The warmer temperatures are luring cherry blossoms out of their buds, young twenty-somethings to the nearest outdoor bar and some very stinky pests out of hiding. If you have noticed a scourge of stink bugs crawling around your house, you’re not alone. The particular type of stink bug common in the D.C. area is the brown marmorated stink bug and it is an invasive species that came to the U.S. in the late 1990s from Asia. “It was first observed near Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1998,” said University of Maryland Entomologist Mike Raupp, popularly known as "The Bug Guy."  “Once those temperatures hit the 70 degree mark in the springtime, those stink bugs they're going to become active and they're going to be looking for a way outdoors,” said Raupp.
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