In a desperate attempt to offload some Los Angeles Times-branded apparel, the Opinion Manufacturing Division held a contest last week challenging readers to name the five most popular topics among letter writers during the last half of 2008. Yes, I know, "the last half of 2008" doesn't sound quite as meaningful as the year in full, but we didn't start tallying up the submissions until mid-year.

Anyway, no one entered, so no one will be able to claim the lovely Los Angeles Times sweatshirt we had squirreled away. Hmmm. Perhaps it's time for a new contest: suggest a contest! "Predict the size of the stimulus package," say, or "Guess how many stimulus dollars are directed to Illinois," or "Pick the day when the California Supreme Court throws out Proposition 8".... The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, to close the loop on the whole Letters Top Five contest initiative, here are the answers to the puzzle no one tried to solve:

Of the 16,493 publishable letters received by the letters maven in the last half of 2008, 49% were in one of the Top Five topics:

• Prop. 8, 2,311 letters;
• Sarah Palin, 1,862 letters;
• The economy (including the Wall Street bailout), 1,632 letters;
• Barack Obama, 1,367 letters; and
• John McCain, 944 letters

Not surprisingly, politics were the dominant theme. Still, it's telling that Palin would generate more letters than the men at the top of the two tickets. What this bodes for her future is anybody's guess, but it does suggest another possible contest: Guess the date that Palin forms an exploratory committee for her presidential campaign.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not counted in the chart.