A resourceful blogger’s quest to trade up on one red paperclip until his bartering produced a house has paid off. On Wednesday Kyle MacDonald will be owner of a home on the prairie after the small town of Kipling, Saskatchewan, decided to turn over the keys to a three-bedroom property as a way to stem its population loss.
MacDonald (26) from Montreal, first offered to swap his paperclip on Craigslist a year ago, starting a trading sequence that produced offers of a snowmobile, a record contract, a movie, and a year’s rent on a house in Phoenix, Arizona. The last was tempting, but he swapped the rent money for an afternoon with Alice Cooper. Then, confounding a blogosphere tracking MacDonald’s trades, he gave up his audience with Alice Cooper for a vintage snow globe showing the band Kiss.
At that point, the people of Kipling, population 1 100, made their move, with a house on Main Street and a giant red paperclip at a highway rest stop.
Town officials hope it will attract tourists. MacDonald just wants a place to settle down while he writes his book. ”This is such a cool community project. It feels right,” he told the Associated Press. – Guardian Unlimited Â